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POEMS 
ROBERT BROWNING 




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POEMS 



BY 



ROBERT BROWNING 



EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 
BY CORNELIA BEARE, INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH, 
ERASMUS HALL HIGH SCHOOL, NEW YORK CITY 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO, 

44-60 East Twenty-third Street 



PUBLISHERS' NOTE 
JHerriiPa eufflisil) Cej:ts 

This series of books will include in complete editions 
those masterpieces of English Literature that are best adapted 
for the use of schools and colleges. The editors of the 
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in connection with the texts to be issued under their indi- 
vidual supervision, but familiarity with the practical needs 
of the classroom, no less than sound scholarship, will char- 
acterize the editing of every book in the series. 

In connection with each text, a critical and historical 
introduction, including a sketch of the life of the author and 
his relation to the thought of his time, critical opinions of 
the work in question chosen from the great body of English 
criticism, and, where possible, a portrait of the author, will 
be given. Ample explanatory notes of such passages in the 
text as call for special attention will be supplied, but irrele- 
vant annotation and explanations of the obvious will be 
rigidly excluded. 

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Copyright, 1909 

BY 

CHARLES E. MERRILL CO. 



©CI, A 25 14 '.K 



h 

CONTENTS 

Introduction: page 

Life of Browning 5 

Critical Opinions 12 

Poems: 

Cavalier Tunes 15 

The Lost Leader 18 

How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to 

Aix 20 

Evelyn Hope 24 

Home Thoughts, from Abroad 27 

Home Thoughts, from the Sea 28 

Incident of the French Camp 28 

The Boy and the Angel 30 

One Word More 34 

Herve Riel 44 

Pheidippides 52 

My Last Duchess 61 

Up at a Villa — Down in the City 64 

The foregoing poems are mentioned for College Entrance Require- 
ments in English for 1909-1915. 

Saul 70 

A Grammarian's Funeral 97 

Song from Pippa Passes 103 

An Epistle. Containing the Strange Medical Ex- 
perience of Karshish, the Arab Physician . . 104 

Meeting at Night 116 

Parting at Morning 117 

3 



4 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Prospice 117 

Epilogue to Asolando 118 

My Star 120 

Rabbi ben Ezra 120 

Memorabilia 130 

AbtVogler . . . 131 

Andrea del Sarto 139 

By the Fireside 151 

Notes: 

Cavalier Tunes 165 

How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to 

Aix 165 

Home Thoughts from the Sea 166 

Incident of the French Camp 166 

The Boy and the Angel 166 

One Word More 167 

HerveRiel 167 

Pheidippides 168 

My Last Duchess 170 

Up at a Villa — Down in the City 171 

Saul 171 

A Grammarian's Fimeral 174 

Song from Pippa Passes 175 

An Epistle 176 

Meeting at Night 177 

Prospice 178 

Epilogue to Asolando 178 

My Star 179 

Rabbi Ben Ezra 179 

Abt Vogler 179 

Andrea del Sarto 180 

By the Fireside 182 



INTRODUCTION 



ROBERT BROWNING 

Robert Browning was born at Camberwell, a suburb 
of London, May 7, 1812. From his earliest years he was 
fond of writing verses, and, when twelve years of age, 
had produced poems enough to form a volume. His 
first published poem, Pauline, appeared in 1833, but his 
real introduction to the public was through Paracelsus, 
a drama, published in 1835. In 1837 the tragedy of 
Strafford was unsuccessfully presented at Drury Lane 
Theater. In 1840 the epic Sordello was published — 
one of his most characteristic and most difficult works. 
In 1841-46 appeared the series of Bells and Pomegranates, 
in eight shilling parts, containing much of his finest 
poetry, including the tragedy A Blot on the 'Scutcheon 
and the graceful dramatic poem Pippa Passes. In 1846 
he was married to the distinguished poetess, Elizabeth 
Barrett, and soon after established his home in Italy. 
Christmas Eve and Easter Day appeared in 1850, followed 
by two volumes of short poems, Men and Women, 1855, 
and Dramatis Persons, 1864. His greatest work, The 
Ring and the Book, appeared in 1868-69, closely followed 
by many other important poems, chief of which are 
Fifine at the Fair, 1872; Red Cotton Night-cap Country, 
1873; Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn Album, 1875. 
Most important of his latest works are Dramatic Idyls, 
1879-80; Jocoseria, 1883; Ferishtah's Fancies, 1885; 
Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their 
Day, 1887; and Asolando, 1889. He died at Venice, 
May 12, 1889. 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION 

The first and perhaps the final impression we receive 
from the works of Robert Browning is that of a great 
nature, an immense personality. The poet in him is 
made up of many men. He is dramatist, humorist, 
lyrist, painter, musician, philosopher, and scholar, each 
in full measure, and he includes and dominates them all. 
In richness of nature, in scope and penetration of mind 
and vision, in all the potentialities of poetry, he is prob- 
ably second among English poets to Shakespeare alone. 
In art, in the power of the patience of working his native 
ore, he is surpassed by many; but few have ever held so 
rich a mine in fee. He has written more than any other 
English poet with the exception of Shakespeare, and he 
comes very near the gigantic total of Shakespeare. His 
works are not a mere collection of poems, they are a lit- 
erature. And his literature is the richest of modern times. 
If " the best poetry is that which reproduces the most of 
life," his place is among the great poets of the world. In 
the vast extent of his work he has dealt witK or touched 
on nearly every phase and feature of humanity, and his 
scope is bounded only by the soul's limits and the last 
reaches of life. There are for him but two realities and 
but two subjects, Life and Thought. On these are ex- 
pended all his imagination and all his intellect, more con- 
sistently and in a higher degree than can be said of 
any English poet since the age of Elizabeth. Life and 
thought, the dramatic and the metaphysical, are not 
considered apart, but woven into one seamless tissue; 
and in regard to both he has one point of view and one 
manner of treatment. It is this that causes the unity 
which subsists throughout his works, and it is this, .too, 
which distinguishes him among poets, and makes that 
originality by virtue of which he has been described as 
the most striking figure in our poetic literature. 

Most poets endeavor to sink the individual in the 
universal; it is the special distinction of Mr. Browning 



INTRODUCTION 7 

that when he is most universal he is most individual. 
As a thinker he conceives of humanity not as an aggregate, 
but as a collection of units. Most thinkers write and 
speak of man; Mr. Browning of men. With man as a 
species, with man as a society, he does not concern him- 
self, but with individual man and man. Every man is 
for him an epitome of the universe, a center of creation. 
Life exists for each as completely and separately as if he 
were the only inhabitant of our planet. 

Here it is that Mr. Browning parts company most 
decisively with all other poets who concern themselves 
exclusively with life — dramatic poets, as we call them ; 
so that it seems almost necessary to invent some new 
term to define precisely his special attitude. And hence 
it is that in his drama thought plays comparatively so 
large, and action comparatively so small, a part; hence, 
that action is valued only in so far as it reveals thought 
or motive, not for its own sake, as the crown and flower 
of these. For his endeavor is not to set men in action 
for the pleasure of seeing them move; but to see and 
show, in their action and inaction alike, the real im- 
pulses of their being: to see how each soul conceives of 
itself. 

The dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense 
in which we apply it to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, 
aims at showing, by means of action, the development of 
character as it manifests itself to the world in deeds. 
His study is character, but it is character in action, 
considered only in connection with a particular grouping 
of events, and only so far as it produces or operates upon 
these. The processes are concealed from us, we see the 
result. We are told nothing, we care to know nothing, 
of what is going on in the thought ; of the infinitely subtle 
meshes of motive or emotion which will perhaps find no 
direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation in 
action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. 



8 INTRODUCTION 

But is there no other sense in which a poet may be 
dramatic, besides this sense of the acting drama? no new 
form possible, which 

" perad venture may outgrow 
The simulation of the painted scene, 
Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, 
And take for a noble stage the soul itself, 
Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, 
With all its grand orchestral silences, 
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds?" 1 

This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Mr. 
Browning — a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy 
of the soul. Instead of a grouping of characters which 
shall act on one another to produce a certain result in 
action, we have a grouping of events useful or important 
only as they influence the character or the mind. In this 
way, by making the soul the center of action, he is enabled 
(thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to 
bring out its characteristics, to reveal its very nature. 

This, then, is Mr. Browning's consistent mental atti- 
tude, and his special method. But he has also a special 
instrument — the monologue. The drama of action de- 
mands a concurrence of several distinct personalities, 
influencing one another rapidly by word or deed, so as 
to bring about the catastrophe; hence the propriety of 
the dialogue. But the introspective drama, in which 
the design is to represent and reveal the individual, re- 
quires a concentration of interests, a focusing of light 
on one point, to the exclusion or subordination of sur- 
roundings; hence the propriety of the monologue, in 
which a single speaker or thinker can consciously or un- 
consciously exhibit his own soul. Nearly all the lyrics, 

1 Aurora Leigh, Book Fifth. 



INTRODUCTION 9 

romances, idyls — nearly all the miscellaneous poems, 
long and short — are monologues. 

The characteristic of which I have been speaking — 
the persistent care for the individual and personal, as 
distinguished from the universal and general — while 
it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly 
his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the 
ordinary conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences 
for it. Compare, altogether apart from the worth and 
workmanship, one of Lord Tennyson's with one of Mr. 
Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the former 
consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings 
common to all. The perfection of the latter consists in 
the intensity of its expression of a single moment of 
passion or emotion; one peculiar to a single personality, 
and to that personality only at such a single moment. 
To appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously 
into the imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, 
even when this is easiest to do, it is evident that there 
must be more difficulty in doing it — for it requires a 
certain exertion — than in merely letting the mind lie 
at rest, accepting and absorbing. 

Allied to Mr. Browning's originality in temper, topic, 
manner of treatment, and special form, is his originality 
in style. His style is vital ; his verse moves to the throb- 
bing of an inner organism, not to the pulsations of a ma- 
chine. He prefers, as indeed all true poets do, but more 
exclusively than any other poet, sense to sound, thought 
to expression. In his desire of condensation he employs 
as few words as are consistent with the right expression 
of his thought; he rejects superlative adjectives and all 
stop-gap words. He refuses to use words for words' 
sake ; he declines to interrupt conversation with a display 
of fireworks; and, as a result, it will be found that his 
finest effects of versification correspond with his highest 
achievements in imagination and passion. As a dra- 



10 INTRODUCTION 

matic poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, 
sometimes even to vulgarize, his style and diction for the 
proper expression of some particular character, in whose 
mouth exquisite turns of phrase and delicate felicities 
of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not let him- 
self go in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose 
themes are more "ideal." And where many writers 
would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, 
he endeavors to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it 
strength and newness. It follows that Mr. Browning's 
verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other 
poets. But he is far, indeed, from paying no attention, 
or little, to meter and versification. In one very im- 
portant matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest 
master in our language; in single and double, in simple 
and grotesque alike, he succeeds in fitting rhyme to rhyme 
with a perfection which I have never found in any other 
poet of any age. His lyrical poems contain more struc- 
tural varieties of form than those of any preceding Eng- 
lish poet, not excepting Shelley. His blank verse at its 
best is of higher quality — taking it for what it is, dra- 
matic blank verse — than that of any other modern 
poet. And both in rhymed and in blank verse he has 
written passages which for almost every quality of verse 
are hardly to be surpassed in the language. 

That there is some excuse for the charge of "ob- 
scurity" so often brought against Mr. Browning, no one 
would or could deny. But it is only the excuse of a mis- 
conception. Mr. Browning is a thinker of extraordinary 
depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom superficial, 
often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift 
as it is subtle. To a dull reader there is little difference 
between cloudy and fiery thought ; the one is as much too 
bright for him as the other is too dense. Of all thinkers 
in poetry, Mr. Browning is the most swift and fiery. 
Moreover, while a writer who deals with easy themes 



INTRODUCTION \\ 

has no excuse if he is not pellucid to a glance, one who 
employs his intellect and imagination on high and hard 
questions has a right to demand a corresponding closeness 
of attention. 

When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is recorded that 
he debated within himself whether he should not become 
a painter or a musician as well as a poet. Finally, though 
not, I believe, for a good many years, he decided in the 
negative. But the latent qualities of painter and musi- 
cian have developed themselves in his poetry, and much 
of his finest and very much of his most original verse is- 
that which speaks the language of painter and musician 
as it had never before been spoken. No English poet 
before him has ever excelled his utterances on music, 
none has so much as rivaled his utterances on art. In 
his poems on the sister arts of painting and sculpture — 
not in themselves more perfect in sympathy, though far 
greater in number, than those on music — he is simply 
the first to write of these arts as an artist might, if he 
could express his soul in words or rhythm. 

It is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a 
painter should be capable of superb landscape painting 
in verse; and we find in Mr. Browning this power. It is 
further evident that such a poet — a man who has chosen 
poetry instead of painting — must consider the latter art 
subordinate to the former, and it is only natural that we 
should find Mr. Browning subordinating the pictorial 
to the poetic capacity, and this more carefully than most 
other poets. His best landscapes are as brief as they are 
brilliant. They are as saber-strokes, swift, sudden, flash- 
ing the light from their sweep, and striking straight to 
the heart. And they are never pushed into prominence 
for an effect of ideal beauty, nor strewn about in the way 
of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like roses in a 
runner's path. They are subordinated always to the 
human interest; blended, fused with it, so that a landscape 



12 INTRODUCTION 

in a poem of Mr. Browning's is literally a part of the 
emotion. 

Of all poets Mr. Browning is the healthiest and man- 
liest. His genius is robust with vigorous blood, and his 
tone has the cheeriness of intellectual health. The most 
subtle of minds, his is the least sickly. The wind that 
blows in his pages is no hot or languorous breeze, laden 
with scents and sweets, but a fresh salt wind blowing in 
from the sea. The keynote of his philosophy is: 

"God's in his heaven, 
All's right with the world!" 

He has such a hopefulness of belief in human nature that 
he shrinks from no man, however clothed and cloaked in 
evil, however miry with stumblings and fallings. This 
vivid hope and trust in man is bound up with a strong 
and strenuous faith in God. Mr. Browning's Christianity 
is wider than our creeds, and is all the more vitally 
Christian in that it never sinks into pietism. He is never 
didactic, but his faith is the root of his art, and transforms 
and transfigures it. Yet as a dramatic poet he is so im- 
partial, and can express all creeds with so easy an inter- 
pretative accent, that it is possible to prove him (as 
Shakespeare has been proved) a believer in everything 
and a disbeliever in anything. 

Condensed from " Introduction to Study of Browning " by 
Arthur Symons. 

CRITICAL OPINIONS 

I can have little doubt that my writing has been in 
the main too hard for many I should have been pleased 
to communicate with; but I never designedly tried to 
puzzle people, as some of my critics have supposed. On 
the other hand, I never pretended to offer such literature 
as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes 



INTRODUCTION 13 

to an idle man. So, perhaps, on the whole I get my 
deserts and something over — not a crowd, but a few I 
value more. — Robert Browning to W. G. Kingsland. 

Browning, when, in poem or drama, he puts forth his 
peculiar power, when he writes with the motive which 
gives his work its singular value, is always dramatic. 
Whether he is so of purpose I shall not venture to say: 
but the seeming of his poetry is that it takes its shape 
from a necessity of his moral nature, not from deliberate 
intellectual preference. He never seems to be telling 
us what he thinks or feels; but he puts before us some 
man, — male or female, — whose individuality soon be- 
comes as clear and as absolute as our own; and that man 
pours his heart and soul out before us in words which 
are a part of him, utterly careless of what we think of 
the life whose hidden motives are thus laid bare to cen- 
sure. The poet does not appear; indeed so wholly is he 
merged in the creature of his own will that, as we hear 
that creature speak, his creator is, for the time, quite 
forgotten. This is the perfection of dramatic power. 
It has been shown with this high absoluteness in English 
poetry by but two men, one of whom is Browning. — 
Richard Grant White. 

Man here on earth, according to the central and con- 
trolling thought of Mr. Browning, man here in a state 
of preparation for other lives, and surrounded by won- 
drous spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere 
that contains him, while, at the same time, he can exist 
only by submitting for the present to the conditions it 
imposes; never without fatal loss becoming content with 
submission, or regarding his present state as perfect or 
final. Our nature here is unfinished, imperfect, but its 
glory, its peculiarity, that which makes us men — not 
God, and not brutes — lies precisely in this character 
of imperfection, giving scope as it does for indefinite 
growth and progress. 



14 INTRODUCTION 

" Progress, man's distinctive mark alone, not God's, 
and not the beasts'; God is, they are, man partly is, and 
wholly hopes to be." . . . 

With Mr. Browning the moments are most glorious in 
which the obscure tendency of many years has been re- 
vealed by the lightning of sudden passion, or in which a 
resolution that changes the current of life has been taken 
in reliance upon that insight which vivid emotion bestows; 
and those periods of our history are charged most fully 
with moral purpose which take their direction from 
moments such as these. — Edward Dowden. 

If there is any great quality more perceptible than 
another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and 
incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of 
perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. 
To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to 
call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action 
of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the 
reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the 
ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty 
the track of intelligence which moves with such incessant 
rapidity. . . . The very essence of Mr. Browning's aim 
and method, as exhibited in the ripest fruits of his intelli- 
gence, is such as implies above all other things the posses- 
sion of a quality the very reverse of obscurity — a faculty 
of spiritual illumination rapid and intense and subtle 
as lightning, which brings to bear upon its central object 
by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol and 
detail on which its light is flashed in passing. — A . C. 
Swinburne. 



CAVALIER TUNES 

r 

I 

CAVALIER TUNES 1 

i 
Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King, 
Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing: 
And, pressing a troop unable to stoop 
And see the rogues nourish and honest folk droop, 
Marched them along, fifty-score strong, 
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 

ii 
God for King Charles! Pym 2 and such carles 3 
To the Devil that prompts 'em their treasonous 

paries ! 4 
Cavaliers, up! Lips from the cup, 
Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup, 
Till you're — 

(Chorus) Marching along, fifty -score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 
15 



16 CAVALIER TUNES 

III 

Hampden to hell, and his obsequies' knell 
Serve Hazelrig, Fiennes, and young Harry as well! 
England, good cheer! Rupert is near! 
Kentish and loyalist, keep we not here, 
(Chorus) Marching along, fifty-score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song. 

IV 

Then, God for King Charles ! Pym and his snarls 
To the Devil that pricks on such pestilent carles! 
Hold by the right, you double your might; 
So, onward to Nottingham, fresh for the fight, 
(Chorus) March we along, fifty-score strong, 

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song! 

II 
GIVE A ROUSE 1 



King Charles, and who'll do him right now? 
King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now? 
Give a rouse : here's, in hell's despite now, 
King Charles! 



CAVALIER TUNES 17 

II 

Who gave me the goods that went since? 
Who raised me the house that sank once? 
Who helped me to gold I spent since? 
Who found me in wine you drank once? 
(Chorus) King Charles, and who 1 11 do him right now f 

King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now f 

Give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, 

King Charles! 

in 
To whom used my boy George quaff else, 
By the old fool's side that begot him? 
For whom did he cheer and laugh else, 
While Noll's * damned troopers shot him? 
(Chorus) King Charles, and who'll do him right now ? 

King Charles, and who's ripe for fight now ? 

Give a rouse: here's, in hell's despite now, 

King Charles! 

Ill 
BOOT AND SADDLE 

i 
Boot, saddle, to horse, and away! 
Rescue my castle before the hot day 
Brightens to blue from its silvery gray, 

(Chorus) " Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 



18 THE LOST LEADER 

II 

Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you'd say; 

Many's the friend there, will listen and pray 

" God's luck to gallants that strike up the lay — 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

in 
Forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay, 
Flouts * Castle Brancepeth the Roundheads' array : 
Who laughs, " Good fellows ere this, by my fay, 2 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

IV 

Who? My wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay, 
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, "Nay! 
I've better counselors; what counsel they? 

(Chorus) u Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

THE LOST LEADER 

The Lost Leader was originally written in reference to 
Wordsworth's abandonment of the Liberal cause, with per- 
haps a thought of Southey, but it is applicable to any popular 
apostasy. This is one of those songs that do the work of 
swords. It shows how easily Browning, had he so chosen, 
could have stirred the national feeling with his lyrics. 

Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
Just for a riband to stick in his coat — 



THE LOST LEADER 19 

Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us, 

Lost all the others, she lets us devote; 
They, with the gold to give, doled him out silver, 

So much was theirs who so little allowed : 
How all our copper had gone for his service! 

Rags — were they purple, his heart had been 
proud ! 
We that had loved him so, followed him, honored 
him, 
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 
Learned his great language,' caught his clear ac- 
cents, 
Made him our pattern to live and to die! 
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, 

Burns, Shelley, were with us, — they watch from 
their graves! 
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen, 
He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves! 

We shall march prospering, — not through his 
presence ; 
Songs may inspirit us, — not from his lyre; 
Deeds will be done, — while he boasts his quies- 
cence, 
Still bidding crouch whom the rest bade aspire: 
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more, 



20 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 

One task more declined, one more footpath un- 
trod, 
One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels, 

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God! 
Life's night begins : let him never come back to us ! 

There would be doubt, hesitation and pain, 
Forced praise on our part — the glimmer of twi- 
light, 
Never glad confident morning again ! 
Best fight on well, for we taught him — strike 
gallantly, 
Menace our heart ere we master his own; 
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us, 
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne! 

"HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 
FROM GHENT TO AIX" 

The "good news" of this stirring ballad is intended for 
that of the Pacification of Ghent, a treaty of union entered 
into by Holland, Zealand, and the southern Netherlands 
against the tyrannical Philip II., in 1576. The incident of 
the poem is not historical. "I wrote it," says Browning, 
"under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after 
I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy 
of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse ' York ' then 
in my stable at home." 

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; 

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three; 



HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 21 

"Good speed!" cried the watch, as the gate-bolts 

undrew; 
" Speed!" echoed the wall to us galloping through; 
Behind shut the postern, the lights sank to rest, 
And into the midnight we galloped abreast. 

Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace 
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our 

place; 
I turned in my saddle and made its girths tight, 
Then shortened each stirrup, and set the pique ! 

right, 
Rebuckled the cheek-strap, chained slacker the bit, 
Nor galloped less steadily Roland a whit. 

'Twas moonset at starting; but while we drew near 
Lokeren, 2 the cocks crew and twilight dawned clear; 
At Boom, a great yellow star came out to see; 
At Diiffeld, 'twas morning as plain as could be; 
And from Mecheln 3 church-steeple we heard the 

half chime, 
So Joris broke silence with, " Yet there is time!" 

At Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun, 

And against him the cattle stood black every one, 

To stare through the mist at us galloping past, 



22 HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 

And I saw my stout galloper Roland at last, 

With resolute shoulders, each butting away 

The haze, as some bluff river headlands its spray: 

And his low head and crest, just one sharp ear bent 

back 
For my voice, and the other pricked out on his 

track ; 
And one eye's black intelligence, — ever that 

glance 
O'er its white edge at me, his own master, askance! 
And the thick heavy spume-flakes which aye and 

anon 
His fierce lips shook upwards in galloping on. 

By Hasselt, Dirck groaned; and cried Joris, "Stay 

spur!" 
Your Roos galloped bravely, the fault's not in her, 
We'll remember at Aix" — for one heard the quick 

wheeze 
Of her chest, saw the stretched neck and staggering- 
knees, 
And sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 
As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. 

So we were left galloping, Joris and I, 



HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS 23 

Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; 
The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 
'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like 

'chaff ; 
Till over by Dalhem l a dome-spire sprang white, 
And " Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix is in sight!" 

"How they'll greet us!" — and all in a moment his 

roan 
Rolled neck and croup over, lay dead as a stone; 
And there was my Roland to bear the whole weight 
Of the news which alone could save Aix from her 

fate, 2 
With his nostrils like pits full of blood to the brim, 
And circles of red for his eye-sockets' rim. 

Then I cast loose my buff-coat, each holster let fall, 
Shook off both my jack-boots, let go belt and all, 
Stood up in the stirrup, leaned, patted his ear, 
Called my Roland his pet-name, my horse without 

peer; 
Clapped my hands, laughed and sang, any noise, 

bad or good, 
Till at length into Aix Roland galloped and stood. 

And all I remember is, friends flocking round 



24 EVELYN HOPE 

As I sat with his head 'twixt my knees on the 

ground ; 
And no voice but was praising this Roland of mine, 
As I poured down his throat. our last measure of 

wine, 
Which (the burgesses voted by common consent) 
Was no more than his due who brought good news 

from Ghent. 

EVELYN HOPE 

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead ! 

Sit and watch by her side an hour. 
That is her book-shelf, this her bed ; 

She plucked that piece of geranium-flower, 
Beginning to die too, in the glass; 

Little has yet been changed, I think; 
The shutters are shut, no light may pass 

Save two long rays through the hinge's chink. 

Sixteen years old when she died ! 

Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name ; 
It was not her time to love; beside, 

Her life had many a hope and aim, 
Duties enough, and little cares, 

And now was quiet, now astir, 



EVELYN HOPE 25 

Till God's hand beckoned unawares, — 
And the sweet white brow is all of her. 

Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope? 

What, your soul was pure and true, 
The good stars met in your horoscope, 

Made you of spirit, fire and dew — 
And, just because I was thrice as old 

And our paths in the world diverged so wide, 
Each was naught to each, must I be told? 

We were fellow mortals, naught beside? 

No, indeed! for God above 

Is great to grant, as mighty to make, 
And creates the love to reward the love : 

I claim you still, for my own love's sake! 
Delayed it may be for more lives yet, 

Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few: 
Much is to learn, much to forget, 

Ere the time be come for taking you. 

But the time will come, — at last it will, 

When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say) 

In the lower earth, in the years long still, 
That body and soul so pure and gay? 

Why your hair was amber, I shall divine, 



26 EVELYN HOPE 

And your mouth of your own geranium's red — 
And what you would do with me, in fine, 
In the new life come in the old one's stead. 

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then, 

Given up myself so many times, 
Gained me the gains of various men, 

Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; 
Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, 

Either I missed or itself missed me : 
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! 

What is the issue? let us see! 

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while! 

My heart seemed full as it could hold; 
There was place and to spare for the frank young 
smile, 

And the red young mouth, and the hair's young 
gold. 
So, hush, — I will give you this leaf to keep : 

See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand! 
There, that is our secret: go to sleep! 

You will wake, and remember, and understand. 



HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD 27 

HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD 

Oh, to be in England now that April's there, 

And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning, 

unaware, 
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
In England — now ! 
And after April, when May follows, 
And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows! 
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge 
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover 
Blossoms and dewdrops — at the bent spray's 

edge — 
That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice 

over 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture! 
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, 
And will be gay when noontide wakes anew 
The buttercups, the little children's dower 
— Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! 



28 INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP 

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA 1 

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the Northwest 
died away; 

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into 
Cadiz Bay; 

Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafal- 
gar lay; 

In the dimmest Northeast distance dawned Gib- 
raltar grand and gray; 

"Here and here did England help me: how can I 

help England?" — say, 
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to 

praise and pray 
While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. 

INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP 

You know, we French stormed Ratisbon : 2 

A mile or so away 
On a little mound, Napoleon 

Stood on our storming-day; 
With neck out-thrust, you fancy how, 

Legs wide, arms locked behind, 
As if to balance the prone brow 

Oppressive with its mind. 



INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP 29 

Just as perhaps he mused " My plans 

That soar, to earth may fall, 
Let once my army -leader Lannes l 

Waver at yonder wall," — 
Out 'twixt the battery-smokes there flew 

A rider, bound on bound 
Full-galloping; nor bridle drew 

Until he reached the mound. 

Then off there flung in smiling joy 

And held himself erect 
By just his horse's mane, a boy: 

You hardly could suspect — 
(So tight he kept his lips compressed, 

Scarce any blood came through) 
You looked twice ere you saw his breast 

Was all but shot in two. 

"Well," cried he, " Emperor, by God's grace 

WVve got you Ratisbon! 
The Marshal's in the market-place, 

And you'll be there anon 
To see your flag-bird flap his vans -2 

Where I, to heart's desire, 
Perched him!" The chief's eye flashed; his plans 

Soared up again like fire. 



30 THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 

The chief's eye flashed; but presently 

Softened itself, as sheathes 
A film the mother-eagle's eye 

When her bruised eaglet breathes; 
" You're wounded ! " "Nay," the soldier's pride 

Touched to the quick, he said : 
"I'm killed, Sire!" And his chief beside, 

Smiling the boy fell dead. 

THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 

Morning, evening, noon and night, 
"Praise God!" sang Theocrite. 

Then to his poor trade he turned, 
Whereby the daily meal was earned. 

Hard he labored, long and well ; 
O'er his work the boy's curls fell: 

But ever, at each period, 

He stopped and sang, " Praise God ! " 

Then back again his curls he threw, 
And cheerful turned to work anew. 

Said Blaise, the listening monk, "Well done; 
I doubt not thou art heard, my son : 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 31 

" As well as if thy voice to-day 

Were praising God the Pope's great way. 

"This Easter Day, the Pope at Rome 
Praises God from Peter's dome." 

Said Theocrite, "Would God that I 

Might praise him, that great way, and die!" 

Night passed, day shone, 
And Theocrite was gone. 

With God a day endures alway, 
A thousand years are but a day. 

God said in heaven, " Nor day nor night 
Now brings the voice of my delight." 

Then Gabriel, like a rainbow's birth, 
Spread his wings and sank to earth ; 

Entered, in flesh, the empty cell, 

Lived there, and played the craftsman well; 

And morning, evening, noon and night, 
Praised God in place of Theocrite. 

And from a boy to youth he grew : 
The man put off the stripling's hue: 



32 THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 

The man matured and fell away 
Into the season of decay: 

And ever o'er the trade he bent, 
And ever lived on earth content. 

(He did God's will; to him, all one 
If on the earth or in the sun.) 

God said, " A praise is in mine ear ; 
There is no doubt in it, no fear: 

" So sing old worlds, and so 

New worlds that from my footstool go. 

" Clearer loves sound other ways: 
I miss my little human praise." 

Then forth sprang Gabriel's wings, off fell 
The flesh disguise, remained the cell. 

'Twas Easter Day: he flew to Rome, 
And paused above Saint Peter's dome. 

In the tiring-room ! close by 
The great outer gallery, 

With his holy vestments dight, 
Stood the new Pope, Theocrite : 



THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 33 

And all his past career 
Came back upon him clear, 

Since when, a boy, he plied his trade, 
Till on his life the sickness weighed : 

And in his cell, when death drew near, 
An angel in a dream brought cheer : 

And rising from the sickness drear, 
He grew a priest, and now stood here. 

To the East with praise he turned, 
And on his sight the angel burned. 

" I bore thee from thy craftsman's cell, 
And set thee here; I did not well. 

" Vainly I left my angel-sphere, 
Vain was thy dream of many a year. 

" Thy voice's praise seemed weak ; it dropped — 
Creation's chorus stopped! 

" Go back and praise again 
The early way, while I remain. 

" With that weak voice of our disdain, 
Take up creation's pausing strain. 



34 ONE WORD MORE 

" Back to the cell and poor employ : 
Resume the craftsman and the boy!" 

Theocrite grew old at home; 

A new Pope dwelt in Peter's dome. 

One vanished as the other died : 
They sought God side by side. 

ONE WORD MORE 

i 
There they are, my fifty men and women 
Naming me the fifty poems finished ! 
Take them, Love, the book and me together: 
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also. 

ii 
Rafael made a century of sonnets, 
Made and wrote them in a certain volume 
Dinted with the silver-pointed pencil 
Else he only used to draw Madonnas: 
These, the world might view — but one, the volume. 
Who that one, you ask? Your heart instructs you. 
Did she live and love it all her lifetime? 
Did she drop, his lady of the sonnets, 
Die, and let it drop beside her pillow 



ONE WORD MORE 35 

Where it lay in place of Rafael's glory, 
Rafael's cheek so duteous and so loving — 
Cheek, the world was wont to hail a painter's, 
Rafael's cheek, her love had turned a poet's? 

in 
You and I would rather read that volume, 
(Taken to his beating bosom by it) 
Lean and list the bosom-beats of Rafael, 
Would we not? than wonder at Madonnas — 
Her, San Sisto names, and Her, Foligno, 
Her, that visits Florence in a vision, 
Her, that's left with lilies in the Louvre i — 
Seen by us and all the world in circle. 2 

IV 

You and I will never read that volume. 
Guido Reni, like his own eye's apple 
Guarded long the treasure-book and loved it. 
Guido Reni 3 dying, all Bologna 
Cried, and the world too, "Ours, the treasure!" 
Suddenly, as rare things will, it vanished. 



Dante once prepared to paint an angel : 
Whom to please? You whisper "Beatrice." 4 



36 ONE WORD MORE 

While he mused and traced and retraced it, 
(Peradventure with a pen corroded 
Still by drops of that hot ink he dipped for, 
When, his left hand i' the hair o' the wicked, 
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma, 
Bit into the live man's flesh for parchment, 
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 
Let the wretch go festering through Florence) — 
Dante, who loved well because he hated, 
Hated wickedness that hinders loving, 
Dante standing, studying his angel, — 
In there broke the folk of his Inferno. 
Says he — " Certain people of importance" 
(Such he gave his daily dreadful line to) 
" Entered and would seize, forsooth, the poet." 
Says the poet — "Then I stopped my painting." 

VI 

You and I would rather see that angel, 
Painted by the tenderness of Dante, 
Would we not? — than read a fresh Inferno. 

VII 

You and I will never see that picture. 
While he mused on love and Beatrice, 
While he softened o'er his outlined angel, 



ONE WORD MORE 37 

In they broke, those " people of importance": 
We and Bice l bear the loss forever. 

VIII 

What of Rafael's sonnets, Dante's picture? 

This : no artist lives and loves, that longs not 

Once, and only once, and for one only 

(Ah, the prize!) to find his love a language 

Fit and fair and simple and sufficient — ■ 

Using nature that's an art to others, 

Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature. 

Ay, of all the artists living, loving, 

None but would forego his proper dowry, — 

Does he paint? he fain would write a poem, — 

Does he write? he fain would paint a picture, 

Put to proof art alien to the artist's, 

Once, and only once, and for one only, 

So to be the man and leave the artist, 

Gain the man's joy, miss the artist's sorrow. 

IX 

Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement! 
He who smites the rock and spreads the water, 2 
Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath him, 
Even he, the minute makes immortal, 
Proves, perchance, but mortal in the minute, 



38 ONE WORD MORE 

Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing. 

While he smites, how can he but remember, 

So he smote before, in such a peril, 

When they stood and mocked — " Shall smiting 
help us?" 

When they drank and sneered — "A stroke is 
easy!" 

When they wiped their mouths and went their 
journey, 

Throwing him for thanks — " But drought was 
pleasant." 

Thus old memories mar the actual triumph ; 

Thus the doing savors of disrelish; 

Thus achievement lacks a gracious somewhat; 

O'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate, 

Carelessness or consciousness — the gesture. 

For he bears an ancient wrong about him, 

Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces, 

Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed pre- 
lude — 

''How shouldst thou, of all men, smite, and save 
us?" 

Guesses what is like to prove the sequel — 

" Egypt's flesh-pots — nay, the drought was bet- 
ter." 



ONE WORD MORE 39 

X 

Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant! 
Theirs, the Sinai-forehead's l cloven brilliance, 
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's imperial fiat. 
Never dares the man put off the prophet. 

XI 

Did he love one face from out the thousands, 
(Were she Jethro's daughter, 2 white and wifely, 
Were she but the ^Ethiopian bondslave,) 
He would envy yon dumb patient camel, 
Keeping a reserve of scanty water 
Meant to save his own life in the desert; 
Ready in the desert to deliver 
(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened) 
Hoard and life together for his mistress. 

XII 

I shall never, in the years remaining, 

Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues, 

Make you music that should all-express me; 

So it seems: I stand on my attainment. 

This of verse alone, one life allows me; 

Verse and nothing else have I to give you. 

Other heights in other lives, God willing: 

All the gifts from all the heights, your own, Love! 



40 ONE WORD MORE 

XIII 

Yet a semblance of resource avails us — 

Shade so finely touched, love's sense must seize it. 

Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly, 

Lines I write the first time and the last time. 

He who works in fresco, steals a hair-brush, 

Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly, 

Cramps his spirit, crowds it all in little, 

Makes a strange art of an art familiar, 

Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets. 

He who blows through bronze, may breathe through 

silver, 
Fitly serenade a slumbrous princess. 
He who writes, may write for once as I do. 

XIV 

Love, you saw me gather men and women, 
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy, 
Enter each and all, and use their service, 
Speak from every mouth, — the speech, a poem, 
Hardly shall I tell my joys and sorrows, 
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving: 
I am mine and yours — the rest be all men's, 
Karshish, 1 Cleon, Xorbert, and the fifty. 
Let me speak this once in my true person, 



ONE WORD MORE 41 

Not as Lippo, Roland, or Andrea, 
Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence: 
Pray you, look on these my men and women. 
Take and keep my fifty poems finished ; 
Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also! 
Poor the speech; be how I speak, for all things. 

xv 

Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self! 

Here in London, yonder late in Florence, 

Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured. 

Curving on a sky imbrued with color, 

Drifted over Fiesole i by twilight, 

Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth. 

Full she flared it, lamping Samminiato, 2 

Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and rounder, 

Perfect till the nightingales applauded. 

Now, a piece of her old self, impoverished, 

Hard to greet, she traverses the house-roofs, 

Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver, 

Goes dispiritedly, glad to finish. 

XVI 

What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy? 
Nay : for if that moon could love a mortal, 
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy), 



42 ONE WORD MORE 

All her magic ('tis the old sweet mythos *) , 
She would turn a new side to her mortal, 
Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman — 
Blank to Zoroaster 2 on his terrace, 
Blind to Galileo 3 on his turret, 
Dumb to Homer, dumb to Keats — him, even! 
Think, the wonder of the moonstruck mortal — 
When she turns round, comes again in heaven, 
Opens out anew for worse or better! 
Proves she like some portent of an iceberg- 
Swimming full upon the ship it founders, 
Hungry with huge teeth of splintered crystals? 
Proves she as the paved work of a sapphire 
Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain? 
Moses, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu 4 
Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest, 
Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire. 
Like the bodied heaven in his clearness 
Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work, 
When they ate and drank and saw God also ! 

XVII 

What were seen? None knows, none ever shall 

know. 
Only this is sure — the sight were other, 
Not the moon's same side, born late in Florence, 



ONE WORD MORE 43 

Dying now impoverished here in London. 
God be thanked, the meanest of his creatures 
Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with, 
One to show a woman when he loves her! 

XVIII 

This I say of me, but think of you, Love! 

This to you — yourself my moon of poets ! 

Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder. 

Thus they see you, praise you, think they know 

you! 
There, in turn I stand with them and praise you — 
Out of my own self, I dare to phrase it. 
But the best is when I glide from out them, 
Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, 
Come out on the other side, the novel 
Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, 
Where I hush and bless myself with silence. 

XIX 

Oh, their Rafael of the dear Madonnas, 
Oh, their Dante of the dread Inferno, 
Wrote one song — and in my brain I sing it, 
Drew one angel — borne, see, on my bosom! 



44 HE RYE RIEL 

HERVE RIEL 1 

i 
On the sea and at the Hogue, sixteen hundred 
ninety-two, 
Did the English fight the French, — woe to France ! 
And, the thirty-first of May, helter-skelter thro' 

the blue, 
Like a crowd of frightened porpoises a shoal of 
sharks pursue, 
Came crowding ship on ship to St. Malo 2 on the 
Ranee, 
With the English fleet in view. 

ii 

'Twas the squadron that escaped, with the victor 
in full chase; 
First and foremost of the drove, in his great ship, 
Damfreville ; 3 
Close on him fled, great and small, 
Twenty-two good ships in all; 
And they signaled to the place 
"Help the winners of a race! 

Get us guidance, give us harbor, take us quick — 

or, quicker still, 
Here's the English can and will!" 



HERVE RIEL 45 

III 

Then the pilots of the place put out brisk and leapt 
on board; 
" Why, what hope or chance have ships like these 
to pass?" laughed they: 
" Rocks to starboard, rocks to port, all the passage 

scarred and scored. 
Shall the Formidable here with her twelve and 
eighty l guns 
Think to make the river-mouth by the single 
narrow way, 
Trust to enter where 'tis ticklish for a craft of twenty 
tons, 
And with flow at full beside? 
Now 'tis slackest ebb of tide. 
Reach the mooring? Rather say, 
While rock stands or water runs, 
Not a ship will leave the bay!" 

IV 

Then was called a council straight. 

Brief and bitter the debate : 

" Here's the English at our heels; would you have 

them take in tow 
All that's left us of the fleet, linked together stern 

and bow, 



46 HERVE RIEL 

For a prize to Plymouth ' Sound? 
Better run the ships aground ! " 

(Ended Damfreville his speech.) 
Not a minute more to wait! 

" Let the Captains all and each 

Shove ashore, then blow up, burn the vessels 
on the beach! 
France must undergo her fate. 

v 

"Give the word! " But no such word 
Was ever spoke or heard ; 

For up stood, for out stepped, for in struck amid 
all these 
— A Captain? A Lieutenant? A mate — first, sec- 
ond, third? 
No such man of mark, and meet 
With his betters to compete! 
But a simple Breton sailor pressed by Tourville 2 
for the fleet, 
A poor coasting-pilot he, Herve Riel the Croisickese. 3 

VI 

And, "What mockery or malice have we here?" 
cries Herve Riel: 
"Are you mad, you Malouins? 4 Are you cow- 
ards, fools, or rogues? 



HERVE RIEL 47 

Talk to me of rocks and shoals, me who took the 

soundings, tell 
On my fingers every bank, every shallow, every 
swell 
'Twixt the offing here and Greve 1 where the river 
disembogues? 
Are you bought by English gold? Is it love the 
lying's for? 
Morn and eve, night and day, 
Have I piloted your bay. 
Entered free and anchored fast at the foot of Sol- 
idor. 2 
Burn the fleet and ruin France? That were 
worse than fifty Hogues ! 
Sirs, they know I speak the truth! Sirs, be- 
lieve me there's a way! 
Only let me lead the line, 

Have the biggest ship to steer, 
Get this Formidable clear, 
Make the others follow mine, 

And I lead them, most and least, by a passage I 
know well, 
Right to Solidor past Greve, 

And there lay them safe and sound ; 
And if one ship misbehave, 

— Keel so much as grate the ground, 



48 HERVk RIEL 

Why, I've nothing but my life, — here's my head!" 
cries Herve Riel. 

VII 

Not a minute more to wait. 
"Steer us in, then, small and great! 

Take the helm, lead the line, save the squadron!" 
cried its chief. 
Captains, give the sailor place ! 

He is Admiral, in brief. 
Still the north-wind, by God's grace! 
See the noble fellow's face 
As the big ship, with a bound, 
Clears the entry like a hound, 

Keeps the passage as its inch of way were the wide 
sea's profound ! 

See, safe thro' shoal and rock, 

How they follow in a flock, 
Not a ship that misbehaves, not a keel that grates 
the ground, 

Not a spar that comes to grief! 
The peril, see, is past, 
All are harbored to the last, 
And just as Herve Riel hollas "Anchor!" — sure 

as fate 
Up the English come, too late! 



HERVE RIEL 49 

VIII 

So, the storm subsides to calm: 

They see the green trees wave 

On the heights overlooking Greve. 
Hearts that bled are stanched with balm. 
" Just our rapture to enhance, 

Let the English rake the bay, 1 
Gnash their teeth and glare askance 

As they cannonade away! 
'Neath rampired 2 Solidor pleasant riding on the 

Ranee ! " 
How hope succeeds despair on each Captain's coun- 
tenance ! 
Out burst all with one accord, 

" This is Paradise for Hell! 
Let France, let France's King 
Thank the man that did the thing!" 
What a shout, and all one word, 

"Herve Riel!" 
As he stepped in front once more, 

Not a symptom of surprise 

In the frank blue Breton eyes, 
Just the same man as before. 



50 HERV& RIEL 

IX 

Then said Damfreville, "My friend, 
I must speak out at the end, 

The-' I find the speaking hard. 
Praise is deeper than the lips : 
You have saved the King his ships, 

You must name your own reward. 
'Faith our sun was near eclipse! 
Demand whate'er you will, 
France remains your debtor still. 
Ask to heart's content and have! or my name's not 
Damfreville." 

x 

Then a beam of fun outbroke 
On the bearded mouth that spoke, 
As the honest heart laughed through 
Those frank eyes of Breton blue : 
" Since I needs must say my say, 

Since on board the duty's done, 

And from Malo Roads to Croisic Point, what is 
it but a run? — 
Since 'tis ask and have, I may — 

Since the others go ashore — 
Come! A good whole holiday! 



HERVfi RIEL 51 

Leave to go and see my wife, whom I call the 
Belle Aurore!" 
That he asked and that he got, — nothing more. 

XI 

Name and deed alike are lost: 
Not a pillar nor a post 

In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell ; 
Not a head in white and black 
On a single fishing smack, 

In memory of the man but for whom had gone to 
wrack i 
All that France saved from the fight whence Eng- 
land bore the bell. 2 
Go to Paris : rank on rank 

Search the heroes flung pell-mell 
On the Louvre, 3 face and flank! 

You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve 
Riel. 
So, for better and for worse, 
Herve Riel, accept my verse! 
In my verse, Herve Riel, do thou once more 
Save the squadron, honor France, love thy wife the 
Bell Aurore! 



52 PHEID1PPIDES 

PHEIDIPPIDES * 

Xaipere pucuifxev. 

First I salute this soil of the blessed, river and 

rock! 
Gods of my birthplace, daemons 2 and heroes, honor 

to all! 
Then I name thee, claim thee for our patron, co- 
equal in praise 
— Ay, with Zeus 3 the Defender, with Her of the 

aegis and spear! 
Also ye of the bow and the buskin, 4 praised be your 

peer, 
Now, henceforth and forever, — O latest to whom 

I upraise 
Hand and heart and voice! For Athens, leave 

pasture and flock! 
Present to help, potent to save, Pan 5 — patron I 

call! 

Archons 6 of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I 

return ! 
See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no specter that 

speaks ! 
Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, 

Athens and you, 



PHEIDIPPIDES 53 

"Run, Pheidippicles, run and race, reach Sparta 

for aid! 
Persia has come, we are here, where is She?" Your 

command I obeyed, 
Ran and raced: like stubble, some field which a fire 

runs through 
Was the space between city and city; two days, 

two nights did I burn 
Over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up 

peaks. 
Into their midst I broke: breath served but for 

" Persia has come! 
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water 

and earth : 1 
Razed 2 to the ground is Eretria — but Athens, 

shall Athens sink, 
Drop into dust and die — the flower of Hellas 

utterly die, 
Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the 

stupid, the stander-by? 
Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you 

stretch o'er destruction's brink? 
How — when? No care for my limbs! — there's 

lightning in all and some — 
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give 

it birth!" 



54 PHEIDIPPIDES 

O my Athens — Sparta love thee? Did Sparta 

respond? 
Every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust, 
Malice, — each eye of her gave me its glitter of 

gratified hate! 
Gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for 

excuses. I stood 
Quivering, — the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, 

an inch from dry wood : 
" Persia has come, Athens asks aid, and still they 

debate? 
Thunder, thou Zeus ! Athene, are Spartans a quarry 

beyond 
Swing of thy spear? Phoibos and Artemis, clang 

them ' Ye must 'I" 

No bolt launched from Olumpos! 1 Lo, their 

answer at last! 
"Has Persia come, — does Athens ask aid, — may 

Sparta befriend? 
Nowise precipitate judgment — too weighty the 

issue at stake! 
Count we no time lost time which lags thro' respect 

to the Gods! 
Ponder that precept of old, 'No warfare, whatever 

the odds 



PHEIDIPPIDES 55 

In your favor, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is 

unable to take 
Full-circle her state in the sky!' Already she 

rounds to it fast: 
Athens must wait, patient as we — who judgment 

suspend." 

Athens, — except for that sparkle, — thy name, I 

had moldered to ash! 
That sent a blaze thro' my blood; off, off and away 

was I back, 
— Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the 

false and the vile ! 
Yet "O Gods of my land!" I cried, as each hillock 

and plain, 
Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past 

them again, 
"Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honors we 

paid you erewhile? 
Vain was the filleted ! victim, the fulsome libation! 

Too rash 
Love in its choice, paid you so largely service so 

slack! 

11 Oak and olive and bay, 2 — I bid you cease to en- 
wreathe 



56 PHE1D1PPIDES 

Brows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Per- 
sian's foot, 

You that, our patrons were pledged, should never 
adorn a slave! 

Rather I hail thee, Parnes, 1 — trust to thy wild 
waste tract! 

Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! What mat- 
ter if slacked 

My speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and 
to cave 

No deity deigns to drape with verdure? — at least 
I can breathe, 

Fear in thee no fraud from the blind, no lie from 
the mute!" 

Such my cry as, rapid, I ran over Parnes' ridge; 

Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, 
a bar 

Jutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking 
the way. 

Right! for I minded the hollow to traverse, the 
fissure across: 

" Where I could enter, there I depart by ! Night in 
the fosse? 2 

Athens to aid? Tho' the dive were thro' Erebos, 
thus I obey — 



PHEIDIPPIDES 57 

Out of the day dive, into the day as bravely arise! 

No bridge 
Better!" — when — ha! what was it I came on, of 

wonders that are? 

There, in the cool of a cleft, sat he — majestical Pan! 

Ivy x drooped wanton, 2 kissed his head, moss cush- 
ioned his hoof; 

All the great God was good in the eyes grave- 
kindly — the curl 

Carved on the bearded cheek, amused at a mor- 
tal's awe 

As, under the human trunk, the goat-thighs grand 
I saw. 

"Halt, Pheidippides!" — halt I did, my brain of a 
whirl : 

"Hither to me! Why pale in my presence?" he 
gracious began : 

" How is it, — Athens, only in Hellas, holds me 
aloof? 

" Athens, she only, rears me no fane, makes me no 
feast ! 

Wherefore? Than I what godship to Athens more 
helpful of old? 

Aye, and still, and forever her friend! Test Pan, 
trust me! 



58 PHEIDIPPIDES 

Go, bid Athens take heart, laugh Persia to scorn, 

have faith 
In the temples and tombs! Go, say to Athens, 

'The Goat-God saith: 
When Persia — so much as strews not the soil — 

is cast in the sea, 
Then praise Pan who fought in the ranks with your 

most and least, 
Goat-thigh to greaved-thigh, 1 made one cause with 

the free and the bold ! ' 

" Say Pan saith: ' Let this, foreshowing the place, be 

the pledge!'" 
(Gay, the liberal hand held out this herbage I bear 
— Fennel, 2 — I grasped it a-tremble with dew — 

whatever it bode), 
" While, as for thee ..." But enough! He was 

gone. If I ran hitherto — 
Be sure that the rest of my journey, I ran no longer, 

but flew. 
Parnes to Athens — earth no more, the air was my 

road; 
Here am I back. Praise Pan, we stand no more on 

the razor's edge! 
Pan for Athens, Pan for me! I too have a guerdon 

rare! 



PHEIDIPPIDES 59 

Then spoke Miltiades. 1 "And thee, best runner 
of Greece, 

Whose limbs did duty indeed, — what gift is prom- 
ised thyself? 

Tell it us straightway, — Athens the mother de- 
mands of her son ! " 

Rosily blushed the youth: he paused: but, lifting at 
length 

His eyes from the ground, it seemed as he gathered 
the rest of his strength 

Into the utterance — "Pan spoke thus: 'For what 
thou hast done 

Count on a worthy reward! Henceforth be al- 
lowed thee release 

From the racer's toil, no vulgar reward in praise or 
in pelf!' 

"I am bold to believe, Pan means reward the most 

to my mind! 
Fight I shall, with our foremost, wherever this 

fennel may grow, — 
Pound — Pan helping us — Persia to dust, and, under 

the deep, 
Whelm her away for ever ; and then, — no Athens 

to save, — 



60 PHEIDIPPIDES 

Marry a certain maid, I know keeps faith to the 

brave, — 
Hie to my house and home: and, when my children 

shall creep 
Close to my knees, — recount how the God was 

awful yet kind, 
Promised their sire reward to the full — rewarding 

him — so!" 

Unforeseeing one ! Yes, he fought on the Marathon 

day: 
So, when Persia was dust, all cried "To Akropolis! l 
Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy 

due! 
'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go shout!'' He 

flung down his shield, 
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the 

Fennel-field 
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire 

runs through, 
Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like 

wine thro' clay, 
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died — the 

bliss ! 

So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word 
of salute 



MY LAST DUCHESS 61 

Is still " Rejoice!" — his word which brought 

rejoicing indeed. 
So is Pheidippides happy for ever, — the noble 

strong man 
Who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, 

whom a god loved so well, 
He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and 

was suffered to tell 
Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as 

he began. 1 
So to end gloriously — once to shout, thereafter be 

mute: 
" Athens is saved!" — Pheidippides dies in the 

shout for his meed. 



MY LAST DUCHESS 

FERRARA 

This poem — published in Bells and Pomegranates — is 
the first direct progenitor of Andrea del Sarto and the other 
great blank- verse monologues; in it we see the form, save for 
the scarcely appreciable presence of rhyme, already devel- 
oped. The poem is a subtle study, in the jealousy of egoism 
— not a study so much as a creation ; and it places before 
us, as if bitten out by the etcher's acid, a typical autocrat 
of the Renaissance, with his serene self-composure of selfish- 
ness, quiet uncompromising cruelty, and genuine devotion to 
art. The scene and the actors in this little Italian drama 



62 MY LAST DUCHESS 

stand out before us with the most natural clearness; there 
is some telling touch in every line, an infinitude of cunningly 
careless details, instinct with suggestion, and an appearance 
through it all of simple artless ease, such as only the very 
finest art can give. 

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall, 

Looking as if she were alive. I call 

That piece a wonder, now : Fra Pandolf s l hands 

Worked busily a day, and there she stands. 

Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said 

"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read 

Strangers like you that pictured countenance, 

The depth and passion of its earnest glance, 

But to myself they turned (since none puts by 

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) 

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, 

How such a glance came there; so, not the first 

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not 

Her husband's presence only, called that spot 

Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps 

Fra Pandolf chanced to say " Her mantle laps 

Over my lady's wrist too much," or " Paint 

Must never hope to reproduce the faint 

Half -flush that dies along her throat:" such stuff 

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough 

For calling up that spot of joy. She had 

A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad, 



MY LAST DUCHESS 63 

Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er 

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere. 

Sir, 'twas all one ! My favor at her breast, 

The dropping of the daylight in the West, 

The bough of cherries some officious fool 

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule 

She rode with round the terrace — all and each 

Would draw from her alike the approving speech, 

Or blush, at least. She thanked men, — good! but 

thanked 
Somehow — I know not how — as if she ranked 
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name 
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame 
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill 
In speech — (which I have not) — to make your 

will 
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this 
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss, 
Or there exceed the mark " — and if she let 
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set 
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse, 
— E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose 
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt, 
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without 
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave com- 
mands; l 



64 UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands 

As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet 

The company below, then. I repeat 

The Count your master's known munificence 

Is ample warrant that no just pretense 

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed; 

Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed 

At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go 

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, 1 though, 

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, 

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me ! " 

UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 2 

i 
Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to 

spare, 
The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the 

city-square ; 
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the win- 
dow there ! 

ii 

Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, 

at least! 
There, the whole day long, one's life is a perfect 

feast; 



UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 65 

While up at a villa one lives, I maintain it, no more 
than a beast. 

in 
Well, now, look at our villa! stuck like the horn of 

a bull 
Just on a mountain edge as bare as the creature's 

skull, 
Save a mere shag of a bush, with hardly a leaf to 

pull! 
— I scratch my own, sometimes, to see if the hair's 

turned wool. 

IV 

But the city, oh, the city — the square with the 

houses! Why? 
They are stone-faced, white as a curd, there's 

something to take the eye! 
Houses in four straight lines, not a single front 

awry : 
You watch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, 

who hurries by; 
Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when 

the sun gets high; 
And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted 

properly. 



66 UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 

V 

What of a villa? Though winter be over in March 

by rights, 
Tis May, perhaps, ere the snow shall have withered 

well off the heights ! 
You've the brown ploughed land before, where the 

oxen steam and wheeze, 
And the hills oversmoked behind, by the faint grey 

olive trees. 

VI 

Is it better in May, I ask you? You've summer 

all at once; 
In a day he leaps complete with a few strong April 

suns. 
'Mid the sharp, short emerald wheat, scarce risen 

three fingers well, 
The wild tulip, at end of its tube, blows out its 

great red bell 
Like a thin clear bubble of blood for the children 

to prick and sell. 

VII 

Is it ever hot in the square? There's a fountain to 

spout and splash! 
In the shade it sings and springs; in the shine such 

foam bows flash 



UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 67 

On the horses with curling fish tails, that prance 

and paddle and pash 
Round the lady atop in her conch — fifty gazers 

do not abash, 
Though all she wears is some weeds round her waist 

in a sort of a sash. 

VIII 

All the year long in the villa, nothing to see, though 

you linger, 
Except yon cypress that points like death's lean 

lifted forefinger; 
Some think fireflies pretty, when they mix i' the 

corn and mingle, 
Or thrid the stinking hemp till the stalks of it 

seem atingle. 
Late August or early September, the stunning 

cicala l is shrill 
And the bees keep their tiresome whine round the 

resinous firs on the hill. 
Enough of the seasons, — I spare you the months 

of the fever and chill. 

IX 

Ere you open your eyes in the city, the blessed 
church-bells begin; 



68 UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 

No sooner the bells leave off than the diligence 1 

rattles in; 
You get the pick of the news and it costs you never 

a pin. 
By and by there's the travelling doctor gives pills, 

lets blood, draws teeth; 
Or the Pulcinello 2 trumpet breaks up the market 

beneath. 
At the post-office such a scene-picture, — the new 

play, piping hot ! — 
And a notice how only this morning three liberal 

thieves were shot. 
Above it, behold the Archbishop's most fatherly 

of rebukes, 
And beneath, with his crown and his lion, some 

little new law of the Duke's! 
Or a sonnet with flowery marge, to the Reverend 

Don So-and-So, 
Who is Dante, 3 Boccaccio, Petrarca, St. Jerome, and 

Cicero, 
"And moreover" (the sonnet goes rhyming), "the 

skirts of St. Paul has reached, 
Having preached us those six Lent lectures, more 

unctuous than ever he preached." 
Noon strikes, — here sweeps the procession! our 

Lady borne smiling and smart 



UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 69 

With a pink gauze gown, all spangles, and seven 

swords stuck in her heart ! 
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle the 

fife; 
No keeping one's haunches still; it's the greatest 

pleasure in life. 

x 

But bless you, it's dear, — it's dear! fowls, wine at 

double the rate. 
They've clapped a new tax upon salt, and what oil 

pays passing the gate 
It's a horror to think of. And so, the villa for me, 

not the city! 
Beggars can scarcely be choosers ; but still — ah, 

the pity, the pity! 
Look, two and two go the priests, then the monks 

with cowls and sandals, 
And the penitents dressed in white shirts, a-holding 

the yellow candles; 
One, he carries a flag up straight, and another a 

cross with handles, 
And the Duke's guard brings up the rear, for the 

better prevention of scandals ! 
Bang-whang-whang goes the drum, tootle-te-tootle 

the fife. 



70 SA UL 

Oh, a day in the city-square, there is no such pleas- 
ure in life. 

SAUL 1 



Said Abner, 2 "At last thou art come! Ere I tell, 

ere thou speak, 
Kiss my cheek, wish me well!" Then I wished it, 

and did kiss his cheek. 
And he, "Since the king, O my friend, for thy 

countenance sent, 
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from 

his tent 
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King 

liveth yet, 
Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the 

water be wet. 
For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of 

three days, 
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer 

nor of praise, 
To betoken that Saul and the Spirit 3 have ended 

their strife, 
And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks 

back upon life. 



SAUL 71 

II 

" Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God's child 
with his dew 

On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still liv- 
ing and blue 

Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if 
no wild heat 

Were now raging to torture the desert!" 

in 

Then I, as was meet, 
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on 

my feet, 
And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent 

was unlooped; 
I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I 

stooped ; 
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all 

withered and gone, 
That extends to the second inclosure, I groped my 

way on 
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once 

more I prayed, 
And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not 

afraid 



72 SAUL 

But spoke, " Here is David, thy servant!" And no 

voice replied. 
At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon 

I descried 
A something more black than the blackness — the 

vast, the upright 
Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow 

into sight 
Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of 

all. 
Then a sunbeam, that burst thro' the tent roof, 

showed Saul. 

IV 

He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms 

stretched out wide, 
On the great cross-support in the center, that goes 

to each side; 
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught 

in his pangs 
And waiting his change, the king serpent all heavily 

hangs, 
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance 

come 
With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul, drear * 

and stark, blind and dumb. 



SAUL 73 



V 

Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies we 

twine round its chords 
Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide — 

those sunbeams like swords! 
And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, 

one after one, 
So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be 

done. 
They are white and untorn by the bushes, for lo, 

they have fed 
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the 

stream's bed; 
And now one after one seeks its lodgings, a star fol- 
lows star 
Into eve and the blue far above us, — so blue and 

so far! 

VI 

— Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland 

will each leave his mate 
To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets 

elate 
Till for boldness they fight one another: and then, 

what has weight 



74 SAUL 

To set the quick jerboa * a-musing outside his sand 

house — 
There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird 

and half mouse! 
God made all the creatures and gave them our love 

and our fear, 
To give sign, we and they are his children, one 

family here. 

VII 

Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their 

wine-song, when hand 
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, 

and great hearts expand 
And grow one in the sense of this world's life. — 

And then, the last song 
When the dead man is praised on his journey — 

" Bear him along 
With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! 

Are balm-seeds not here 
To console us? The land has none left such as he 

on the bier. 
Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!" — 

And then, the glad chant 
Of the marriage, — first go the young maidens, 

next, she whom we vaunt 



SAUL 75 

As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling. — And 

then, the great march 
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress 

an arch 
Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends? 

— Then, the chorus intoned 
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 
But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul 

groaned. 

VIII 

And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and 

listened apart; 
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: 

and sparkles 'gan dart 
From the jewels that woke in his turban, at once 

with a start 
All its lordly male-sapphires, 1 and rubies courageous 

at heart. 
So the head: but the body still moved not, still 

hung there erect. 
And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it 

unchecked, 
As I sang, — 

IX 

" Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No 
spirit feels waste, 



76 SAUL 

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew 

unbraced. 
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock 

up to rock, 
The strong rending of boughs from the fir tree, the 

cool silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of 

the bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in 

his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with 

gold dust divine, 
And the locust-flesh 1 steeped in the pitcher, the full 

draught of wine, 
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bul- 
rushes tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly 

and well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living ! 2 how fit 

to employ 
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever 

in joy! 
Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose 

sword thou didst guard 
When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for 

glorious reward? 



SAUL 77 

Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held 

up as men sung 
The low song of the nearly departed, and hear her 

faint tongue 
Joining in while it could to the witness, ' Let one 

more attest, 
I have lived, seen God's hand thro' a lifetime, and 

all was for best!' 
Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, 

not much, but the rest. 
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, 1 the 

working whence grew 
Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the 

spirit strained true : 
And the friends of thy boyhood — that boyhood of 

wonder and hope, 
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond 

the eye's scope, — 
Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is 

thine : 
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one 

head combine! 
On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and 

rage (like the throe 2 
That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets 

the gold go), 



78 SAUL 

High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame 

crowning them, — all 
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature — 

King Saul!" 1 

x 

And lo, with that leap of my spirit, — heart, hand, 

harp, and voice, 
Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding 

rejoice 
Saul's fame in the light it was made for — as when, 

dare I say, 
The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains thro' 

its array, 
And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot 2 — "Saul!" 

cried I, and stopped, 
And waited the thing that should follow. Then 

Saul, who hung propped 
By the tent's cross-support in the center, was 

struck by his name. 
Have ye seen when Spring's arrowy summons goes 

right to the aim, 
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that 

held (he alone, 
While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on 

a broad bust of stone 



SAUL 79 

A year's snow bound about for a breastplate, — 

leaves grasp of the sheet? 
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously 

down to his feet, 
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, 

your mountain of old, 
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages 

untold : 
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each 

furrow and scar 
Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest — 

all hail, there they are! 
— Now again to be softened with verdure, again 

hold the nest 
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the 

green on his crest 
For their food in the ardors of summer. One long 

shudder thrilled 
All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and 

was stilled 
At the King's self left standing before me, released 

and aware. 
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse 

'twixt hope and despair. 1 
Death was past, life not come : so he waited. Awhile 

his right hand 



80 SAUL 

Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant, 

forthwith to remand 
To their place what new objects should enter: 'twas 

Saul as before. 
I looked up, and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was 

hurt any more 
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch 

from the shore, 
At their sad level gaze o'er the ocean — a sun's 

slow decline 
Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o'erlap 

and entwine 
Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, 

arm folded arm 
O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. 

XI 

What spell or what charm, 
(For, awhile there was trouble within me) what 

next should I urge 
To sustain him where song had restored him? 

Song filled to the verge 
His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that 

it yields 
Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: 

bevond, on what fields, 



SAUL 81 

Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten 

the eye, 
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the 

cup they put by? 
He saith, "It is good"; still he drinks not: he lets 

me praise life, 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 

XII 

Then fancies grew rife 
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when 

round me the sheep 
Fed in silence — above, the one eagle wheeled slow 

as in sleep; 
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world 

that might lie 
'Neath his ken, tho' I saw but the strip 'twixt the 

hill and the sky: 
And I laughed — " Since my days are ordained to 

be passed with my flocks, 
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains 

and the rocks, 
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image 

the show 
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly 

shall know! 



82 SAUL 

Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the 

courage that gains, 
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for!" 

And now these old trains 
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, 

once more the string 
Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus — 

XIII 

" Yea, my King," 
I began — "thou dost well in rejecting mere com- 
forts that spring 
From the mere mortal life held in common by man 

and by brute : 
In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our 

soul it bears fruit. 
Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, — how 

its stem trembled first 
Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler; then 

safely outburst 
The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when 

these too, in turn 
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: 

yet more was to learn, 
E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. 

Our dates shall we slight, 



SAUL 83 

When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or 

care for the plight 
Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced 

them? Not so! stem and branch 
Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the 

palm-wine shall stanch 
Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee 

such wine. 
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit 

be thine! 
By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou 

still shalt enjoy 
More indeed, than at first when, inconscious, the 

life of a boy. 
Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each 

deed thou hast done 
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e'en 

as the sun 
Looking down on the earth, tho' clouds spoil him, 

tho' tempests efface, 
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must 

everywhere trace 
The results of his past summer-prime, — so, each 

ray of thy will, 
Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, 

shall thrill 



84 SAUL 

Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till 

they too give forth 
A like cheer to their sons: who in turn, fill the 

South and the North 
With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Ca- 
rouse in the past ! 
But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at 

last. 
As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at 

her height. 
So with man — so his power and his beauty for ever 

take flight. 
No ! Again a long draught of my soul-wine ! Look 

forth o'er the years! 
Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin 

with the seer's! 
Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his 

tomb — bid arise 
A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, 

built to the skies, 
Let it mark where the great First King ! slumbers : 

whose fame would ye know? 
Up above see the rock's naked face, where the 

record shall go 
In great characters cut by the scribe, — Such was 

Saul, so he did; 



SAUL 85 

With the sages directing the work, by the populace 

chid, — 
For not half, they'll affirm, is comprised there! 

Which fault to amend, 
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon 

they shall spend 
(See, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, 

and record 
With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, — the 

statesman's great word 
Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The 

river's a-wave 
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when 

prophet-winds rave: 
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and 

their part 
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank 

God that thou art!" 

XIV 

And behold while I sang . . . but O Thou who didst 

grant me that day, 
And before it not seldom has granted thy help to 

essay, 
Carry on and complete an adventure, — my shield 

and my sword 



86 SAUL 

In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy 

word was my word, — 
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human 

endeavor 
And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed 

hopeless as ever 
On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, 

mighty to save, 
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance — 

God's throne from man's grave! 
Let me tell out my tale to its ending — my voice 

to my heart 
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last 

night I took part, 
As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with 

my sheep, 
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish 1 like 

sleep ! 
For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron 2 

upheaves 
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, 

and Kidron 3 retrieves 
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. 4 



SAUL 87 



XV 

I say then, — my song 
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and, ever 

more strong, 
Made a proffer of good to console him, — he slowly 

resumed 
His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right 

hand replumed 
His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted 

the swathes 
Of his turban, and see — the huge sweat that his 

countenance bathes, 
He wipes off the robe; and he girds now his loins as 

of yore, 
And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the 

clasp set before. 
He is Saul, ye remember in glory, — ere error had bent 
The broad brow from the daily communion; and 

still, tho' much spent 
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, 

God did choose. 
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never 

quite lose. 
So sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by 

the pile 



88 SAUL 

Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned 

there awhile, 
And sat out my singing, — one arm round the tent- 
prop, to raise 
His bent head, and the other hung slack — till 1 

touched on the praise 
I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man 

patient there; 
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then 

first I was 'ware 
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his 

vast knees 
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like 

oak roots which please 
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up 

to know 
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke 

not, but slow 
Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it 

with care 
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my 

brow : thro' my hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back 

my head, with kind power — 
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a 

flower. 



SA UL 89 

Thus held he me there with his great eyes that 
scrutinized mine — 

And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where 
was the sign? 

I yearned — " Could I help thee, my father, invent- 
ing a bliss, 

I would add, to that life of the past, both the future 
and this; 

I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages 
hence, 

As this moment, — had love but the warrant, love's 
heart to dispense!" 

XVI 

Then the truth came upon me. No harp more — 
no song more ! outbroke — l 

XVII 

"I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw 

and I spoke; 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, received 

in my brain 
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork — 

returned him again 
His creation's approval or censure: I spoke as I 

saw. 



90 SAUL 

Reported, as man may of God's work — all's love, 
yet all's law. 

Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each 
faculty tasked 

To perceive him has gained an abyss, where a dew- 
drop was asked. 

Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wis- 
dom laid bare. 

Have I forethought? how purblind, 1 how blank, to 
the Infinite Care! 

Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? 

I but open my eyes, — and perfection, no more and 
no less, 

In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is 
seen God 

In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and 
the clod. 

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 

(With that stoop of the soul which in bending 
upraises it too) 

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's 
all-complete, 

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his 
feet. 

Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity 
known, 



SAUL 91 

I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of 

my own. 
There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to 

hoodwink, 
I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I 

think), 
Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I 

worst 
E'en the Giver in one gift. — Behold, I could love 

if I durst! 
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may 

overtake 
God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain 

for love's sake. 
— What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? 

when doors great and small, 
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the 

hundredth appall? 
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the 

greatest of all? 
Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate 

gift, 
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? 

Here, the parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the creator, — the end, 

what began? 



92 SAUL 

Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for 

this man, 
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who 

yet alone can? 
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, 

much less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the mar- 
velous dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make 

such a soul, 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering 

the whole? 
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears 

attest) , 
These good things being given, to go on, and give 

one more, the best? 
Aye, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain 

at the height 
This perfection, — succeed, with life's dayspring, 

death's minute of night? 
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the 

mistake, 
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid 

him awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to 

find himself set 



SAUL 93 

Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new 
harmony yet 

To be run and continued, and ended — who knows? 
— or endure ! 

The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest 
to make sure; 

By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensi- 
fied bliss, 

And the next world's reward and repose, by the 
struggles in this." 

XVIII 

"I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I 

who receive: 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to 

believe. 
All's one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as 

prompt to my prayer, 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms 

to the air. 
From thy will stream the worlds, life and nature, 

thy dread Sabaoth : x 
I will? — the mere atoms despise me! Why am I 

not loath 
To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it 

I dare 



94 SAUL 

Think but lightly of such impuissance? 1 What 

stops my despair? 
This; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, 

but what man Would do ! 2 
See the King — I would help him, but cannot, the 

wishes fall through. 
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor 

to enrich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — 

knowing which, 
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak thro' 

me now! 
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst 

thou — so wilt thou ! 
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, utter- 
most crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up 

nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no 

breath, 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins 

issue with death! 
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be 

proved 
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being 

Beloved! 



SAUL 95 

He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest 

shall stand the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my 

flesh, that I seek 
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it 

shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee: a Man like 

to me, 
Thou shalt love and be loved by, for ever: a Hand 

like this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See 

the Christ stand!" 

XIX 

I know not too well how I found my way home in 

the night. 
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and 

to right, 
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, 

the aware: 
I repressed, I got thro ? them as hardly, as strug- 

glingly there, 
As a runner beset by the populace famished for 

news — 
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, 

hell loosed with her crews; 



96 SAUL 

And the stars of night beat with emotion, and 

tingled and shot 
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but 

I fainted not, 
For the Hand still impelled me at once and sup- 
ported, suppressed 
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and 

holy behest, 
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth 

sank to rest. 
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered 

from earth — 
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day's 

tender birth; 
In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of 

the hills; 
In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sud- 
den wind-thrills; 
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with 

eye sidling still, 
Tho' averted with wonder and dread; in the birds 

stiff and chill 
That rose heavily as I approached them, made 

stupid with awe: 
E'en the serpent that slid away silent — he felt the 

new law. 



A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 97 

The same stared in the white humid faces upturned 
by the flowers; 

The same worked in the heart of the cedar and 
moved the vine bowers: 

And the little brooks witnessing murmured, per- 
sistent and low, 

With their obstinate, all but hushed voices — " E'en 
so, it is so!" * 



A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 2 

SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING IN 
EUROPE 

Let us begin and carry up this corpse, 

Singing together. 
Leave we the common crofts, 3 the vulgar thorpes, 

Each in its tether 4 
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain, 

Cared-for till cock-crow : 
Look out if yonder be not day agaiu 

Rimming the rock-row ! 5 
That's the appropriate country; there man's thought, 

Rarer, intenser, 
Self -gathered for an outbreak, as it ought, 

Chafes in the censer. 



98 A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 

Leave we the unlettered plain its herd and crop; 

Seek we sepulture 
On a tall mountain, citied to the top, 

Crowded with culture! 
All the peaks soar, but one the rest excels; 

Clouds overcome 1 it; 
No ! yonder sparkle is the citadel's 

Circling its summit. 
Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights: 

Wait ye the warning? 
Our low life was the level's and the night's : 

He's for the morning. 
Step to a tune, square chests, erect each head, 

'Ware the beholders! 
This is our master, famous, calm, and dead, 

Borne on our shoulders. 

Sleep, crop and herd! sleep, darkling thorpe and 
croft 
Safe from the weather ! 
He, whom we convoy to his grave aloft, 

Singing together, 
He was a man born with thy face and throat, 

Lyric Apollo! 
Long he lived nameless: how should spring take 
note 



A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 99 

Winter would follow? 
Till lo, the little touch, and youth was gone! 

Cramped and diminished, 
Moaned he, "New measures, other feet anon! 

My dance is finished!" 
No, that's the world's way; (keep the mountain-side, 

Make for the city !) 
He knew the signal, and stepped on with pride 

Over men's pity; 
Left play for work, and grappled with the world 

Bent on escaping : 
" What's in the scroll," quoth he, "thou keepest 
furled? 

Show me their shaping, 
Theirs who most studied man, the bard and sage, — 

Give!" — So, he gowned him, 1 
Straight got by heart that book to its last page: 

Learned, we found him. 
Yea, but we found him bald too, eyes like lead, 

Accents uncertain : 
"Time to taste life," another would have said, 

"Up with the curtain!" 
This man said rather, "Actual life comes next? 

Patience a moment! 
Grant I have mastered learning's crabbed text, 
Still there's the comment. 



100 A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 

Let me know all! Prate not of most or least, 

Painful or easy! 
Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast, 

Aye, nor feel queasy." l 
Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, 

When he had learned it, 
When he had gathered all books had to give! 

Sooner, he spurned it. 
Image the whole, then execute the parts — 

Fancy the fabric 
Quite, ere you build, ere steel strike fire from quartz, 

Ere mortar dab brick ! 2 

(Here's the town-gate reached; there's the market- 
place 

Gaping before us.) 
Yea, this in him was the peculiar grace 

(Hearten our chorus!) 
That before living he'd learn how to live — 

No end to learning : 
Earn the means first — God surely will contrive 

Use for our earning. 
Others mistrust and say, "But time escapes! 

Live now or never!" 
He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and 
apes! 



A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 101 

Man has Forever." 
Back to his book then: deeper drooped his head: 

Calculus 1 racked him : 
Leaden before, his eyes grew dross of lead: 

Tussis attacked him. 
" Now, master, take a little rest ! " — not he ! 

(Caution redoubled ! 
Step two abreast, the way winds narrowly!) 

Not a whit troubled, 
Back to his studies, fresher than at first, 

Fierce as a dragon 
He (soul-hydroptic 2 with a sacred thirst) 

Sucked at the flagon. 
Oh, if we draw a circle premature, 

Heedless of far gain, 
Greedy for quick returns of profit, sure 

Bad is our bargain ! 
Was it not great? did not he throw on God 

(He loves the burthen) — 
God's task to make the heavenly period 

Perfect the earthen? 3 
Did not he magnify the mind, show clear 

Just what it all meant? 
He would not discount life, as fools do here, 

Paid by installment. 
He ventured neck or nothing — heaven's success 



102 A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 

Found, or earth's failure : 
"Wilt thou trust death or not?" He answered 
"Yes! 

Hence with life's pale lure!" 
That low man seeks a little thing to do, 

Sees it and does it: 
This high man, with a great thing to pursue, 

Dies ere he knows it. 
That low man goes on adding one to one, 

His hundred's soon hit : 
This high man, aiming at a million, 

Misses an unit. 
That, has the world here — should he need the next, 

Let the world mind him! 
This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed 

Seeking shall find Him. 1 
So, with the throttling hands of death at strife, 

Ground he at grammar; 
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife: 

While he could stammer 
He settled Hoti's business — let it be ! — 

Properly based Oun — 
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, 2 

Dead from the waist down. 
Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place: 

Hail to your purlieus, 3 



SONG FROM " PIPPA PASSES " 103 

All ye highfliers of the feathered race, 

Swallows and curlews! 
Here's the top-peak; the multitude below 

Live, for they can, there: 
This man decided not to Live but Know — 

Bury this man there? 
Here — here's his place, 1 where meteors shoot, 
clouds form, 

Lightnings are loosened, 
Stars come and go! Let joy break with the storm, 

Peace let the dew send! 
Lofty designs must close in like effects: 

Loftily lying, 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying. 

SONG FROM " PIPPA PASSES" 2 

The year's at the spring, 
And day's at the morn ; 
Morning's at seven; 
The hill-side's dew-pearled; 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn; 
God's in His heaven — 
All's right with the world! 



104 AN EPISTLE 



AN EPISTLE 



CONTAINING THE STRANGE MEDICAL EXPERIENCE OF 
KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN 

Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs, 

The not-incurious in God's handiwork 

(This man's-flesh he hath admirably made, 

Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste, 

To coop up and keep down on earth a space 

That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul) 

— To Abib, all-sagacious in our art, 

Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast, 

Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks 

Befall the flesh thro' too much stress and strain, 

Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip 

Back and rejoin its source before the term, — 

And aptest in contrivance (under God) 

To baffle it by deftly stopping such : — 

The vagrant Scholar to his sage at home 

Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with 

peace) 
Three samples of true snake-stone 2 — rarer still, 
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped, 
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs) 
And writeth now the twenty-second time. 



AN EPISTLE 105 

My journey ings were brought * to Jericho: 
Thus I resume. Who studious in our art 
Shall count a little labor unrepaid? 
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone 
On many a flinty furlong of this land. 
Also the country-side is all on fire 
With rumors of a marching hitherwarcl: 
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son. 2 
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear : 
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls: 
I cried and threw my staff and he was gone. 
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me, 
And once a town declared me for a spy; 3 
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem, 
Since this poor covert where I pass the night, 
This Bethany, 4 lies scarce the distance thence 
A man with plague-sores at the third degree 
Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here! 
'Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe, 
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip 
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields. 
A viscid choler 5 is observable 
In tertians, I was nearly bold to say; 
And falling-sickness hath a happier cure 
Than our school wots of : there's a spider 6 here 
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs, 



106 AN EPISTLE 

Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back; 

Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his 

mind. 
The Syrian run-a-gate I trust this to? 
His service payeth me a sublimate 
Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye. 
Best wait : I reach Jerusalem at morn, 
There set in order my experiences, 
Gather what most deserves, and give thee all — 
Or I might add, Judaea's gum-tragacanth 
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained, 
Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry, 1 
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease 
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy: 
Thou hadst 2 admired one sort I gained at Zoar — 
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end. 

Yet stay! my Syrian blinketh gratefully, 
Protesteth his devotion is my price 3 — 
Suppose I write what harms not, tho' he steal? 
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, 
What set me off a- writing first of all. 
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! 
For, be it this town's barrenness — or else 
The Man had something in the look of him — 
His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. 
So, pardon if — (lest presently I lose, 



AN EPISTLE 107 

In the great press of novelty at hand, 
The care and pains this somehow stole from me) 
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind, 
Almost in sight — for, wilt thou have the truth? 
The very man is gone from me but now, 
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse. 
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all' 

Tis but a case of mania: subinducecl 
By epilepsy, at the turning point 
Of trance prolonged unduly some three days 
When, by the exhibition ! of some drug 
Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art 
Unknown to me, and which 'twere well to know, 
The evil thing, outbreaking all at once, 
Left the man whole and sound of body indeed, — 
But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide, 
Making a clear house of it too suddenly, 
The first conceit that entered might inscribe 
Whatever it was minded on the wall 
So plainly at that vantage, as it were, 
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent 
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls 
The just-returned and new-established soul 
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart 
That henceforth she will read or these or none. 



108 AN EPISTLE 

And first — the man's own firm conviction rests 
That he was dead (in fact they buried him) 

— That he was dead and then restored to life 
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe : 

— 'Sayeth, the same bade " Rise/' and he did rise. 
" Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry. 

Not so this figment ! — not, that such a fume, 1 

Instead of giving way to time and health, 

Should eat itself into the life of life, 

As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all! 

For see, how he takes up the after-life. 

The man — it is one Lazarus a Jew, 

Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age, 

The body's habit wholly laudable, 

As much, indeed, beyond the common health 

As he were made and put aside to show. 

Think, could we penetrate by any drug 

And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh, 

And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep! 

Whence has the man the balm that brightens all? 

This grown man eyes the world now like a child. 

Some elders of his tribe, I should premise, 

Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep, 

To bear my inquisition. While they spoke, 

Now sharply, now with sorrow, — told the case, — 

He listened not except I spoke to him, 



AN EPISTLE 109 

But folded his two hands and let them talk, 
Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool. 
And that's a sample how his years must go. 
Look if a beggar, in fixed middle-life, 
Should find a treasure, — can he use the same 
With straitened habits and with tastes starved 

small, 
And take at once to his impoverished brain 
The sudden element that changes things, 
That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand, 
And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust? 
Is he not such an one as moves to mirth — 
Warily parsimonious, when no need, 
Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times? 
All prudent counsel as to what befits 
The golden mean, is lost on such an one: 
The man's fantastic will is the man's law. 
So here — we call the treasure knowledge, say, 
Increased beyond the fleshly faculty — 
Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth, 
Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven: 
The man is witless of the size, the sum, 
The value in proportion of all things, 
Or whether it be little or be much. 
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments 
Assembled to besiege his city now, 



110 AN EPISTLE 

And of the passing of a mule with gourds — 

Tis one! Then take it on the other side, 

Speak of some trifling fact, — he will gaze rapt 

With stupor at its very littleness, 

(Far as I see) as if in that indeed 

He caught prodigious import, whole results; 

And so will turn to us the bystanders 

In ever the same stupor (note the point) 

That we too see not with his opened eyes. 

Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, 

Preposterously, at cross purposes. 

Should his child sicken unto death, — why, look 

For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, 

Or pretermission of the daily craft ! 

While a word, gesture, glance from that same child 

At play or in the school or laid asleep, 

Will startle him to an agony of fear, 

Exasperation, just as like. Demand 

The reason why — "'tis but a word," object — 

" A gesture" — he regards thee as our lord ! 

Who lived there in the pyramid alone, 

Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young, 

We both would unadvisedly recite 

Some charm's beginning, from that book of his, 

Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst 

All into stars, as suns grown old are wont. 



AN EPISTLE 111 

Thou and the child have each a veil alike 

Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both 

Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match 

Over a mine of Greek fire, 1 did ye know! 

He holds on firmly to some thread of life — 

(It is the life to lead perforcedly) 

Which runs across some vast distracting orb 

Of glory on either side that meager thread, 

Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet — ■ 

The spiritual life around the earthly life : 

The law of that is known to him as this, 

His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here. 

So is the man perplext with impulses 

Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on, 

Proclaiming what is right and wrong across, 

And not along, this black thread thro' the blaze — 

"It should be" balked by ''here it cannot be." 

And oft the man's soul springs into his face 

As if he saw again and heard again 

His sage that bade him "Rise" and he did rise. 

Something, a word, a tick o' the blood within 

Admonishes: then back he sinks at once 

To ashes, who was very fire before, 

In sedulous recurrence to his trade 

Whereby he earneth him the daily bread ; 

And studiously the humbler for that pride, 



112 AN EPISTLE 

Professedly the faultier that he knows 

God's secret, while he holds the thread of life. 

Indeed the especial marking of the man 

Is prone submission to the heavenly will — 

Seeing it, what it is, and why it is. 

'Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last 

For that same death which must restore his being 

To equilibrium, body loosening soul 

Divorced even now by premature full growth: 

He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live 

So long as God please, and just how God please. 

He even seeketh not to please God more 

(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as Gocl please. 

Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach 

The doctrine of his text whate'er it be, 

Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do : 

How can he give his neighbor the real ground, 

His own conviction? Ardent as he is — 

Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old 

"Be it as God please" reassureth him. 

I probed the sore as thy disciples should : 

"How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness 

Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march 

To stamp out like a little spark thy town, 

Thy tribe, thy crazy tale, and thee at once?" 

He merely looked with his large eyes on me. 



AN EPISTLE 113 

The man is apathetic, you deduce? 

Contrariwise, he loves both old and young, 

Able and weak, affects the very brutes 

And birds — how say I? flowers of the field — 

As a wise workman recognizes tools 

In a master's workshop, loving what they make. 

Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb : 

Only impatient, let him do his best, 

At ignorance and carelessness and sin — 

An indignation which is promptly curbed: 

As when in certain travel I have feigned 

To be an ignoramus in our art 

According to some proconceived design, 

And happed to hear the land's practitioners 

Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, 

Prattle fantastically on disease, 

Its cause and cure — and I must hold my peace ! 

Thou wilt object — Why have I not ere this 
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene 
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source, 
Conferring with the frankness that befits? 
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech 
Perished in a tumult many years ago, 
Accused, — our learning's fate, — of wizardry, 
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule 



114 AN EPISTLE 

And creed prodigious as described to me. 

His death, which happened when the earthquake 

fell 
(Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss 
To occult learning in our lord the sage 
Who lived there in the pyramid alone) 
Was wrought by the mad people — that's their 

wont ! 
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it, 
To his tried virtue, for miraculous help — 
How could he stop the earthquake? That's their 

way! 
The other imputations must be lies : 
But take one, tho' I loathe to give it thee, 
In mere respect for any good man's fame. 
(And after all, our patient Lazarus 
Is stark mad; should we count on what he says? 
Perhaps not : tho' in writing to a leech 
'Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.) 
This man so cured regards the curer, then, 
As — God forgive me ! who but God himself, 
Creator and sustainer of the world, 
That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile. 
— 'Sayeth that such an one was born and lived, 
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own 

house, 



AN EPISTLE 115 

Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know, 
And yet was . . . what I said nor choose repeat, 
And must have so avouched himself, in fact, 
In hearing of this very Lazarus 
Who saith — but why all this of what he saith? 
Why write of trivial matters, things of price 
Calling at every moment for remark? 
I noticed on the margin of a pool 
Blue-flowering borage, 1 the Aleppo sort, 
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange! 

Thy pardon for this long and tedious case, 
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem 
Unduly dwelt upon, prolixly set forth! 
Nor I myself discern in what is writ 
Good cause for the peculiar interest 
And awe indeed this man has touched me with. 
Perhaps the journey's end, the weariness 
Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus : 
I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills 
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came 
A moon made like a face with certain spots 
Multiform, manifold, and menacing: 
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met 
In this old sleepy town at unaware, 
The man and I. I send thee what is writ. 



116 MEETING AT NIGHT 

Regard it as a chance, a matter risked 

To this ambiguous Syrian: he may lose, 

Or steal, or give it thee with equal good. 

Jerusalem's repose shall make amends 

For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine ; 

Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell! l 

The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? 

So, the All-Great, were the All- Loving too — 

So, thro' the thunder comes a human voice 

Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! 

Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! 

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine : 

But love I gave thee, with myself to love, 

And thou must love me who have died for thee!" 

The madman saith He said so : it is strange. 2 

MEETING AT NIGHT 3 

i 

The gray sea and the long black land ; 
And the yellow half-moon large and low; 
And the startled little waves that leap 
In fiery ringlets from their sleep, 
As I gain the cove with pushing prow, 
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand. 



PROSPICE 117 

II 

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; 
Three fields to cross till a farm appears; 
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch 
And the blue spurt of a lighted match, 
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears, 
Than the two hearts beating each to each! 

PARTING AT MORNING 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 

PROSPICE l 

Fear death? — to feel the fog in my throat, 

■ The mist in my face, 

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote 

I am nearing the place, 
The power of the night, the press of the storm, 

The post of the foe ; 
Where he stands, the Arch Fear 2 in a visible form, 

Yet the strong man must go: 



118 EPILOGUE TO "ASOLANDO" 

For the journey is done and the summit attained, 

And the barriers fall, 
Tho' a battle's to fight ere the guerdon ' be gained, 

The reward of it all. 
I was ever a fighter, so — one fight more, 

The best and the last! 
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and 
forebore, 

And bade me creep past. 
No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers 

The heroes of old, 
Bear the brunt, 2 in a minute pay glad life's arrears 

Of pain, darkness, and cold. 
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, 

The black minute's at end, 
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul! 3 I shall clasp thee again, 
And with God be the rest! 



EPILOGUE TO "ASOLANDO" 4 

At the midnight in the silence of the sleep-time, 
When you set your fancies free, 



EPILOGUE TO "ASOLANDO " 119 

Will they pass to where — by death, fools think, 

imprisoned — 
Low he lies who once so loved you, whom you loved 

so, 

— Pity me? 

Oh to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken! 

What had I on earth to do 
With the slothful, with the mawkish, 1 the unmanly? 
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel 
— Being — who? 

One who never turned his back but marched breast 
forward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, 2 wrong 

would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should 

be, 
"Strive and thrive!" cry " Speed, — fight on, fare 3 

ever 

There as here!" 



120 RABBI BEN EZRA 

MY STAR 
All that I know 

Of a certain star l 
Is, it can throw 

(Like the angled spar) __^_ 

Now a dart of red, 

Now a dart of blue; 
Till my friends have said 

They would fain see, too, 
My star that dartles the red and the blue ! 
Then it stops like a bird ; like a flower, hangs furled : 

They must solace themselves with the Saturn 
above it. 
What matter to me if their star is a world? 

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. 

RABBI BEN EZRA 

In Rabbi ben Ezra Mr. Browning has crystallized his re- 
ligious philosophy into a shape of abiding beauty. It has 
been called, not rashly, the noblest of modern religious 
poems. Alike in substance and in form it belongs to the 
highest order of meditative poetry; and it has an almost 
unique quality of grave beauty, of severe restraint, of earnest 
and measured enthusiasm. This is one of those poems 
which can never be profitably analyzed or commented on: 
it must be read. What the Psalm of Life is to the people 
who do not think, Rabbi ben Ezra might and should be to 
those who do ; a light through the darkness — a lantern of 



RABBI BEN EZRA 121 

guidance and a beacon of hope — to the wanderers lost and 
weary in the selva selvagyia. It is one of those poems that 
mold character. 

Grow old along with me! 
The best is yet to be. 1 

The last of life, for which the first was made: 
Our times are in His hand 
Who saith, "A whole I planned, 
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be 
afraid!" 

Not that, amassing flowers, 
Youth sighed, " Which rose makes ours, 
Which lily leave and then as best recall?" 
Not that, admiring stars, 
It yearned, "Nor Jove, nor Mars; 
Mine be some figured flame which blends, trans- 
cends them all!" 

Not for such hopes and fears 

Annulling youth's brief years, 

Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark! 

Rather I prize the doubt 

Low kinds exist without, 

Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark. 

Poor vaunt of life indeed, 



122 RABBI BEN EZRA 

Were man but formed to feed 
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast; 
Such feasting ended, then 
As sure an end to men ; 

Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw- 
crammed beast? ! 

Rejoice we are allied 
To That which doth provide 
And not partake, effect and not receive! 
A spark disturbs our clod ; 
Nearer we hold of God 2 

Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must 
believe. 

Then, welcome each rebuff 
That turns earth's smoothness rough, 
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! 
Be our joys three-parts pain! 
Strive, and hold cheap the strain; 
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge 
the throe! 

For thence, — a paradox 

Which comforts while it mocks, — 

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail : 



RABBI BEN EZRA 123 

What I aspired to be, 

And was not, comforts me: l 

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' 

the scale. 

What is he but a brute 
Whose flesh hath soul to suit, 
Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play? 
To man, propose this test — 
Thy body at its best, 

How far can that project thy soul on its lone 
way? 

Yet gifts should prove their use : 
I own the Past profuse 
Of power each side, perfection every turn: 
Eyes, ears took in their dole, 2 
Brain treasured up the whole; 

Should not the heart beat once " How good to live 
and learn"? 

Not once beat " Praise be Thine! 

I see the whole design, 

I, who saw Power, see now Love perfect too: 

Perfect I call Thy plan: 

Thanks that I was a man! 



124 RABBI BEN EZRA 

Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thou 
shalt do!" 

For pleasant is this flesh; 
Our soul, in its rose-mesh 
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest : 
Would we some prize might hold 
To match those manifold 

Possessions of the brute, — gain most, as we did 
best! 

Let us not always say 

" Spite of this flesh to-day 

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the 

whole!" 
As the bird wings and sings, 
Let us cry, " All good things 
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh 

helps soul!" 

Therefore I summon age 

To grant youth's heritage, 

Life's struggle having so far reached its term : l 

Thence shall I pass, approved 

A man, for aye removed 

From the developed brute; a God though in the germ. 



RABBI BEN EZRA 125 

And I shall thereupon 

Take rest, ere I be gone 

Once more on my adventure brave and new: 

Fearless and unperplexed, 

When I wage battle next, 

What weapons to select, what armor to indue. 

Youth ended, I shall try 

My gain or loss thereby; 

Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold: 

And I shall weigh the same, 

Give life its praise or blame : 

Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old. 

For, note when evening shuts, 

A certain moment cuts 

The deed off, calls the glory from the gray: 

A whisper from the west 

Shoots — " Add this to the rest, 

Take it and try its worth: here dies another day." 

So, still within this life, 

Though lifted o'er its strife, 

Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, 

"This rage was right i' the main, 

That acquiescence vain: 



126 RABBI BEN EZRA 

The Future I may face now I have proved the 

Past." 

For more is not reserved 
To man, with soul just nerved 
To act to-morrow what he learns to-day: 
Here, work enough to watch 
The Master work, and catch 

Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool's true 
play. 

As it was better, youth 
Should strive, through acts uncouth, 
Toward making, than repose on aught found made: 
So, better, age, exempt 
From strife, should know, than tempt 
Further. Thou waitedst age: wait death, nor be 
afraid ! 

Enough now, if the Right 
And Good and Infinite 

Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own, 
With knowledge absolute, 
Subject to no dispute 

From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel 
alone. 



RABBI BEN EZRA 127 

Be there, for once and all, 
Severed great minds from small, 
Announced to each his station in the Past! 
Was I, the world arraigned, 
Were they, my soul disdained, 

Right? * Let age speak the truth and give us 
peace at last! 

Now, who shall arbitrate? 
Ten men love what I hate, 
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; 
Ten, who in ears and eyes 
Match me: we all surmise, 

They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul 
believe? 

Not on the vulgar mass 
Called "work," must sentence pass, 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price, 
O'er which, from level stand, 
The low world laid its hand, 

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a 
trice: 

But all, the world's coarse thumb 
And finger failed to plumb, 



128 RABBI BEN EZRA 

So passed in making up the main account: 
All instincts immature, 
All purposes unsure, 

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's 
amount : 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into a narrow act, 

Fancies that broke through language and escaped: 
All I could never be, 
All men ignored in me, 

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher 
shaped. 

Ay, note that Potter's wheel, 
That metaphor! 1 and feel 

Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay, — 
Thou, to whom fools propound, 
When the wine makes its round, 
"Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, 
seize to-day!" 

Fool! All that is, at all, 

Lasts ever, past recall; 

Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure: 

What entered into thee, 



RABBI BEN EZRA 129 

That was, is, and shall be: 

Time's wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay 
endure. 

He fixed thee mid this dance 

Of plastic circumstance, 

This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: 

Machinery just meant 

To give thy soul its bent, 

Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed. 

What though the earlier grooves 

Which ran the laughing loves 

Around thy base, no longer pause and press? 

What though, about thy rim, 

Skull-things in order grim 

Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress? 

Look not thou down but up ! 
To uses of a cup, 

The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal, 
The new wine's foaming flow, 
The Master's lips aglow! 

Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou 
with earth's wheel? 



130 MEMORABILIA 

But I need, now as then, 

Thee, God, who moldest men! 

And since, not even while the whirl was worst, 

Did I, — to the wheel of life 

With shapes and colors rife, 

Bound dizzily, — mistake my end, to slakeThy thirst: 

So, take and use Thy work, 

Amend what flaws may lurk, 

What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the 

aim ! 
My times be in Thy hand ! 
Perfect the cup as planned ! 
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the 

same ! 

MEMORABILIA 

This poem, says Mrs. Orr, "is a picturesque comment on 
the power of personal association to give importance to any 
incident, however trifling; and tends to show that, from this 
point of view, no incident is more trifling than another." 
The enthusiastic lover of Shelley has so idealized the poet 
that he can hardly believe him to be a man that can be 
spoken to like other men. For him a falling eagle-feather, 
with its sudden suggestion of the ethereal poet, is enough 
to drive away all other memories of the moor. 

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, 
And did he stop and speak to you, 



AST VOGLER 131 

And did you speak to him again? 
How strange it seems, and new! 

But you were living before that, 

And also you are living after; 
And the memory I started at — 

My starting moves your laughter! 

I crossed a moor, with a name of its own 
And a certain use in the world, no doubt, 

Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone 
'Mid the blank miles round about : 

For there I picked up on the heather 

And there I put inside my breast 
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather! 

Well, I forget the rest. 

ABT VOGLER 

(after he has been extemporizing upon the 
musical instrument of his invention) 

Abt Vogler 1 is an utterance on music which exceeds every 
attempt that has ever been made in verse to set forth the 
secret of the most sacred and illusive of the arts. Only the 
wonderful lines in the Merchant of Venice come anywhere 
near it. It is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in 
the language. The wonder and beauty of it grow on one, 
as the wonder and beauty of a sky, of the sea, of a landscape, 



132 ABT VOGLER 

beautiful indeed and wonderful from the first, become momen- 
tarily more evident, intense and absorbing. Life, religion, 
and music — the Ganzen, Guten, Schonen of existence — are 
combined in threefold unity, apprehended and interpreted 
in their essential spirit. 

Would that the structure brave, the manifold 
music I build, 
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their 
work, 
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as 
when Solomon willed ' 
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons 
that lurk, 
Man, brute, reptile, fly, — alien of end and of aim, 
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell- 
deep removed, — 
Should rush into sight at once as he named the in- 
effable Name, 
And pile him a palace straight, to pleasure the 
princess he loved ! 

Would it might tarry like his, the beautiful build- 
ing of mine, 
This which my keys in a crowd pressed and im- 
portuned to raise! 

Ah, one and all, how they helped, would dispart 
now and now combine, 



ABT VOGLER 133 

Zealous to hasten the work, heighten their mas- 
ter his praise! 
And one would bury his brow with a blind-plunge 
down to hell, 

Burrow a while and build, broad on the roots of 
things, 
Then up again swim into sight, having based me 
my palace well, 

Founded it, fearless of flame, flat on the nether 
springs. 

And another would mount and march, like the 
excellent minion he was, 
Ay, another and yet another, one crowd but with 
many a crest, 
Raising my rampired walls of gold as transparent 
as glass, 
Eager to do and die, yield each his place to the 
rest : 
For higher still and higher (as a runner tips with fire, 
When a great illumination surprises a festal 
night — 
Outlining round and round Rome's dome from 
space to spire) 
Up, the pinnacled glory reached, and the pride of 
my soul was in sight. 



134 ABT VOGLER 

In sight? Not half! for it seemed, it was certain, 
to match man's birth, 
Nature in turn conceived, obeying an impulse as I; 
And the emulous heaven yearned down, made effort 
to reach the earth, 
As the earth had done her best, in my passion, 
to scale the sky: 
Novel splendors burst forth, grew familiar and 
dwelt with mine, 
Not a point nor peak but found, but fixed its 
wandering star; 
Meteor-moons, balls of blaze: and they did not pale 
nor pine, 
For earth had attained to heaven, there was no 
more near nor far. 

Nay more; for there wanted not who walked in the 

glare and glow, 
Presences plain in the place; or, fresh from the 

Protoplast, 1 
Furnished for ages to come, when a kindlier wind 

should blow, 
Lured to now begin and live, in a house to their 

liking at last; 
Or else the wonderful Dead who have passed 

through the body and gone, 



ABT VOGLER 135 

But were back once more to breathe in an old 

world worth their new: 
What never had been, was now; what was, as it 

shall be anon; 
And what is, — shall I say, matched both? for I 

was made perfect too. 1 

All through my keys that gave their sounds to a 
wish of my soul, 
All through my soul that praised as its wish 
flowed visibly forth, 
All through music and me! For think, had I 
painted the whole, 
Why, there it had stood, to see, nor the process 
so wonder-worth. 
Had I written the same, made verse — still, effect 
proceeds from cause, 
Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the 
tale is told; 
It is all triumphant art, but art in obedience to 
laws, 
Painter and poet are proud, in the artist-list 
enrolled : — 

But here is the finger of God, 2 a flash of the will 
that can, 



136 ABT VOGLER 

Existent behind all laws: that made them, and, 
lo, they are! 
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed 
to man, 
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth 
sound, but a star. 
Consider it well: each tone of our scale in itself is 
naught ; 
It is everywhere in the world — loud, soft, and 
all is said : 
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my 
thought, 
And, there! Ye have heard and seen: consider 
and bow the head ! 

Well, it is gone at last, the palace of music I 
reared ; 
Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that 
come too slow; 
For one is assured at first, one scarce can say that 
he feared, 
That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing 
was to go. 
Never to be again! But many more of the kind 
As good, nay, better perchance: is this your com- 
fort to me? 



ABT VOGLER 137 

To me, who must be saved because I cling with my 
mind 
To the same, same self, same love, same God : ay, 
what was, shall be. 

Therefore to whom turn I but to thee, the ineffable 
Name? 
Builder and maker, thou, of houses not made 
with hands! 
What, have fear of change from thee who art ever 
the same? 
Doubt that thy power can fill the heart that thy 
power expands? 
There shall never be one lost good! What was, 
shall live as before; 
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying 
sound ; 
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so 
much good more; 
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a 
perfect round. 

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, 
shall exist; 
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, 
nor power 



138 ABT VOGLER 

Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for 
the melodist, 
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour. 
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth 
too hard, 
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in 
the sky, 
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard ; 
Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it 
by-and-by. 

And what is our failure here but a triumph's evi- 
dence 
For the fullness of the days? Have we withered 
or agonized? 
W T hy else was the pause prolonged but that sing- 
ing might issue thence? 
Why rushed the discords in, but that harmony 
should be prized? 
Sorrow is hard to bear, and doubt is slow to clear, 
Each sufferer says his say, his scheme of the weal 
and woe: 
But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the 
ear; 
The rest may reason and welcome; 'tis we musi- 
cians know. 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 139 

Well, it is earth with me; silence resumes her reign: 
I will be patient and proud, and soberly ac- 
quiesce. 
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord 
again, 
Sliding by semitones, till I sink to the minor, — 

yes, 

And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien 
ground, 
Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into 
the deep; 
Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my rest- 
ing-place is found, 
The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to 
sleep. 

ANDREA DEL SARTO 

[called "the faultless painter"] 

Andrea del Sarto is a "translation into song" of the picture 
called "Andrea del Sarto and his Wife," now in the Pitti 
Palace, Florence. It is a perfect re-creation of the Andrea 
described by Vasari, whose story is one of the saddest in the 
records of art. The story is well known; how the painter, 
who at one time seemed as if he might have competed with 
Raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his beautiful 
soulless wife, the fatal Lucrezia del Fede; and how, led and 
lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal, 
and, losing all heart and hope, sank into the cold correctness, 



140 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

the unerring fluency, the uniform, melancholy repetition 
of a single type — his wife's — which distinguish his later 
works. Mr. Browning has taken his facts from Vasari, and 
he has taken them quite literally. But what a change, 
what a transformation and transfiguration! No more abso- 
lutely creative work has been done in our days; few more 
beautiful and pathetic poems written. The mood of sad, 
wistful, hopeless mournfulness of resignation which the poem 
expresses is a somewhat rare one with Mr. Browning's 
vivid and vivacious genius. It is an autumn twilight piece. 
The very movement of the lines, their very tone and touch, 
contribute to the effect. A single clear impression is made 
to result from an infinity of the minutest and scarcely appre- 
ciable touches: how fine these touches are, how clear the 
impression, can only be hinted at in words, can be realized 
only by a loving and scrupulous study. 

But do not let us quarrel any more, 
No, my Lucrezia ! bear with me for once : 
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish. 
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart? 
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear, 
Treat his own subject after his own way, 
Fix his own time, accept too his own price, 
And shut the money into this small hand 
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly? 
Oh, I'll content him, — but to-morrow, Love! 
I often am much wearier than you think, 
This evening more than usual: and it seems 
As if — forgive now — should you let me sit 
Here by the window, with your hand in mine, 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 141 

And look a half hour forth on Fiesole, 1 

Both of one mind, as married people use, 2 

Quietly, quietly the evening through, 

I might get up to-morrow to my work 

Cheerful and fresh as ever. Let us try. 

To-morrow, how you shall be glad for this ! 

Your soft hand is a woman of itself, 

And mine, the man's bared breast she curls inside. 

Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve 

For each of the five pictures we require : 

It saves a model. So ! keep looking so — 

My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! 

— How could you ever prick those perfect ears, 
Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet — 

My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, 
Which everybody looks on and calls his, 
And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, 
While she looks — no one's : very dear, no less. 
You smile? why there's my picture ready made, 
There's what we painters call our harmony! 
A common grayness silvers every thing, — 
All in a twilight, you and I alike 

— You, at the point of your first pride in me 
(That's gone, you know) — but I, at every point; 
My youth, my hope, my art, being all toned down 
To yonder sober pleasant Fiesole. 



142 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

There's the bell clinking from the chapel-top ; 

That length of convent-wall across the way 

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside; 

The last monk leaves the garden ; days decrease, 

And autumn grows, autumn in every thing. 

Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape, 

As if I saw alike my work and self 

And all that I was born to be and do, 

A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand. 

How strange now looks the life he makes us lead; 

So free we seem, so fettered fast we are! 

I feel he laid the fetter : let it lie ! 

This chamber, for example — turn your head — 

All that's behind us ! You don't understand 

Nor care to understand about my art, 

But you can hear at least when people speak : 

And that cartoon, the second from the door 

— It is the thing, Love! so such things should be: 

Behold Madonna! — I am bold to say. 

I can do with my pencil what I know, 

What I see, what at bottom of my heart 

I wish for, if I ever wish so deep — 

Do easily, too — when I say, perfectly. 

I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, 

Who listened to the Legate's talk last week; 

And just as much they used to say in France. 1 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 143 

At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! 

No sketches first, no studies, that's long past: 

I do what many dream of, all their lives, 

— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do, 

And fail in doing. I could count twenty such 

On twice your fingers, and not leave this town, 

Who strive — you don't know how the others 

strive 
To paint a little thing like that you smeared 
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, — 
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says, 
(I know his name, no matter) — so much less! 
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged. 
There burns a truer light of Gocl in them, 
In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up 

brain, 
Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to prompt 
This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand 1 of 

mine. 
Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I 

know, 
Reach many a time a heaven that's shut to me, 
Enter and take their place there sure enough, 
Though they come back and cannot tell the world. 
My works are nearer heaven, but I sit here. 
The sudden blood of these men ! at a word — 



144 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

Praise them, it boils, or blame them, it boils too. 
I, painting from myself and to myself, 
Know what I do, am unmoved by men's blame 
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks 
Morello's ! outline there is wrongly traced, 
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, 
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that? 
Speak as they please, what does the mountain 

care? 2 
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 3 
Or what's a heaven for? All is silver-gray, 
Placid and perfect with my art : the worse ! 
I know both what I want and what might gain; 
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh 
" Had I been two, another and myself, 
Our head would have o'erlooked the world!" No 

doubt. 
Yonder's.a work now, of that famous youth 
The Urbinate 4 who died five years ago. 
(Tis copied, George Vasari 5 sent it me.) 
Well, I can fancy how he did it all, 
Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, 
Reaching, that heaven might so replenish him, 
Above and through his art — for it gives way : 
That arm is wrongly put — and there again — 
A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 145 

Its body, so to speak : its soul is right, 

He means right — that, a child may understand. 

Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: 

But all the play, the insight and the stretch — 

Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out? 

Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul, 

We might have risen to Rafael, I and you. 

Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think — 

More than I merit, yes, by many times. 

But had you — oh, with the same perfect brow, 

And perfect eyes, and more than perfect mouth, 

And the low voice my soul hears, as a bird 

The fowler's pipe, and follows to the snare — 

Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind! 

Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged 

"God and the glory! never care for gain. 

The present by the future, 1 what is that? 

Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo! 2 

Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!" 

I might have done it for you. So it seems : 

Perhaps not. All is as God overrules. 

Beside, incentives come from the soul's self; 

The rest avail not. Why do I need you? 

What wife had Rafael, or has Agnolo? 

In this world, who can do a thing, will not; 

And who would do it, cannot, I perceive: 



146 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

Yet the will's somewhat — somewhat, too, the 

power — 
And thus we half-men struggle. At the end, 
God, I conclude, compensates, punishes. 
Tis safer for me, if the award be strict, 
That I am something underrated here, 
Poor this long while, despised, to speak the truth. 
I dared not, do you know, leave home all day, 
For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. 1 
The best is when they pass and look aside; 
But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all. 
Well may they speak! That Francis, that first 

time, 
And that long festal year at Fontainebleau ! 
I surely then could sometimes leave the ground, 
Put on the glory, Rafael's daily wear, 
In that humane great monarch's golden look, — 
One finger in his beard or twisted curl 
Over his mouth's good mark that made the smile, 
One arm about my shoulder, round my neck, 
The jingle of his gold chain in my ear, 
I painting proudly with his breath on me, 
All his court round him, seeing with his eyes, 
Such frank French eyes, and such a fire of souls 
Profuse, my hand kept plying by those hearts, — 
And, best of all, this, this, this face beyond, 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 147 

This in the background, waiting on my work, 
To crown the issue with a last reward! 
A good time, was it not, my kingly days? 
And had you not grown restless . . . but I know — 
'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said; 
Too live the life grew, golden and not gray: 
And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt 
Out of the grange whose four walls make this 

world. 
How could it end in any other way? 
You called me, and I came home to your heart. 
The triumph was, to have ended there; then, if 

I reached it ere the triumph, what is lost? x 

Let my hands frame your face in your hair's gold, 
You beautiful Lucrezia that are mine! 

II Rafael did this, Andrea painted that; 
The Roman's is the better when you pray, 
But still the other's Virgin was his wife " 2 — 
Men will excuse me. I am glad to judge 
Both pictures in your presence; clearer grows 
My better fortune, I resolve to think. 

For, do you know, Lucrezia, as God lives, 

Said one day Agnolo, his very self, 

To Rafael ... I have known it all these years . . . 

(When the young man was flaming out his thoughts 

Upon a palace-wall for Rome to see, 



148 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

Too lifted up in heart because of it) 

" Friend, there's a certain sorry little scrub 

Goes up and down our Florence, none cares how, 

Who, were he set to plan and execute 

As you are, pricked on by your popes and kings, 

Would bring the sweat into that brow of yours !" 

To Rafael's! — And indeed the arm is wrong. 

I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see, 

Give the chalk here — quick, thus the line should 

go! 
Ay, but the soul! he's Rafael! rub it out! 
Still, all I care for, if he spoke the truth, 
(What he? why, who but Michel Agnolo? 
Do you forget already words like those?) 
If really there was such a chance so lost, — 
Is, whether you're — not grateful — but more pleased. 
Well, let me think so. And you smile indeed! 
This hour has been an hour! Another smile? 
If you would sit thus by me every night 
I should work better, do you comprehend? 
I mean that I should earn more, give you more. 
See, it is settled dusk now; there's a star; 
Morello's gone, the watch-lights show the wall, 
The cue-owls speak the name we call them by. 
Come from the window, Love, — come in, at last, 
Inside the melancholy little house 



ANDREA DEL SARTO 149 

We built to be so gay with. God is just. 

King Francis may forgive me: oft at nights 

When I look up from painting, eyes tired out, 

The walls become illumined, brick from brick 

Distinct, instead of mortar, fierce bright gold, 

That gold of his I did cement them with! 

Let us but love each other. Must you go? 

That cousin here again? he waits outside? 

Must see you — you, and not with me? Those 

loans? • 

More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that? 
Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend? 
While hand and eye and something of a heart 
Are left me, work's my ware, and what's it worth? 
I'll pay my fancy. Only let me sit 
The gray remainder of the evening out, 
Idle, you call it, and muse perfectly 
How I could paint, were I but back in France, 
One picture, just one more — the Virgin's face, 
Not yours this time! I want you at my side 
To hear them — that is, Michel Agnolo — 
Judge all I do and tell you of its worth. 
Will you? To-morrow, satisfy your friend. 
I take the subjects for his corridor, 
Finish the portrait out of hand — there, there, 
And throw him in another thing or two 



150 ANDREA DEL SARTO 

If he demurs; the whole should prove enough 

To pay for this same cousin's freak. Beside, 

What's better and what's all I care about, 

Get you the thirteen scudi for the ruff! 

Love, does that please you? Ah, but what does he, 

The cousin! what does he to please you more? 

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night. 
I regret little, I would change still less. 
Since there my .past life lies, why alter it? 
The very wrong to Francis ! — it is true 
I took his coin, was tempted and complied, 
And built this house and sinned, and all is said. 
My father and my mother died of want. 
Well, had I riches of my own? you see 
How one gets rich! Let each one bear his lot. 
They were born poor, lived poor, and poor they 

died: 
And I have labored somewhat in my time 
And not been paid profusely. Some good son 
Paint my two hundred pictures — let him try ! 
No doubt, there's something strikes a balance. Yes, 
You love me quite enough, it seems to-night. 
This must suffice me here. What would one 

have? 
In heaven, perhaps, new chances, one more chance — 



BY THE FIRESIDE 151 

Four great walls in the New Jerusalem, 
Meted on each side by the angel's reed, 
For Leonard, 1 Rafael, Agnolo, and me 
To cover — the three first without a wife, 
While I have mine ! So — still they overcome 
Because there's still Lucrezia, — as I choose. 

Again the cousin's whistle! Go, my Love. 



BY THE FIRESIDE 

How well I know what I mean to do 

When the long, dark autumn evenings come; 

And where, my soul, is 2 thy pleasant hue? 
With the music of all thy voices, dumb 

In life's November too! 

I shall be found by the fire, suppose, 

O'er a great wise book, as beseemeth age; 

While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, 
And I turn the page, and I turn the page, 

Not verse now, only prose! 

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip, 
" There he is at it, deep in Greek: 



152 BY THE FIRESIDE 

Now then, or never, out we slip 

To cut from the hazels by the creek 
A mainmast for our ship ! " 

I shall be at it indeed, my friends! 

Greek puts already on either side 
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends 

To a vista opening far and wide, 
And I pass out where it ends. 

The outside frame, like your hazel-trees — 
But the inside-archway widens fast, 

And a rarer sort succeeds to these, 
And we slope to Italy at last 

And youth, by green degrees. 

I follow wherever I am led, 

Knowing so well the leader's hand: 

Oh woman-country, wooed not wed, 

Loved all the more by earth's male-lands, 

Laid to their hearts instead! 

Look at the ruined chapel again 
Half-way up in the Alpine gorge ! 

Is that a tower, I point you plain, 
Or is it a mill, or an iron forge 

Breaks solitude in vain? 



BY THE FIRESIDE 153 

A turn, and we stand in the heart of things; 

The woods are round us, heaped and dim; 
From slab to slab how it slips and springs, 

The thread of water single and slim, 
Through the ravage some torrent brings! 

Does it feed the little lake below? 

That speck of white just on its marge 
Is Pella; see, in the evening glow, 

How sharp the silver spear-heads charge 
When Alp meets heaven in snow ! 

On our other side is the straight-up rock; 

And a path is kept 'twixt the gorge and it 
By bowlder-stones, where lichens mock 

The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit 
Their teeth to the polished block. 

Oh the sense of the yellow mountain-flowers, 

And thorny balls, each three in one, 
The chestnuts throw on our path in showers! 

For the drop of the woodlands fruit's begun, 
These early November hours, 

That crimson the creeper's leaf across 
Like a splash of blood, intense, abrupt, 



154 BY THE FIRESIDE 

O'er a shield else gold from rim to boss, 

And lay it for show on the fairy-cupped 
Elf -needled mat of moss, 

By the rose-flesh mushrooms, undivulged 
Last evening — nay, in to-day's first dew 

Yon sudden coral nipple bulged, 

Where a freaked fawn-colored flaky crew 

Of toad-stools peep indulged. 

And yonder, at foot of the fronting ridge 
That takes the turn to a range beyond, 

Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge, 
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond 

Danced over by the midge. 

The chapel and bridge are of stone alike, 

Blackish-gray and mostly wet; 
Cut hemp-stalks steep * in the narrow dike. 

See here again, how the lichens fret 2 
And the roots of the ivy strike ! 

Poor little place, where its one priest comes 

On a festa-day, if he comes at all, 
To the dozen folk from their scattered homes, 

Gathered within that precinct small 
By the dozen ways one roams — 



BY THE FIRESIDE 155 

To drop from the charcoal-burners' huts, 
Or climb from the hemp-dressers' low shed, 

Leave the grange where the woodman stores his nuts, 
Or the wattled cote where the fowlers spread 

Their gear on the rock's bare juts. 

It has some pretension, too, this front, 
With its bit of fresco half-moon-wise 

Set over the porch, Art's early wont : 
'Tis John in the Desert, I surmise, 

But has borne the weather's brunt — 

Not from the fault of the builder, though, 

For a pent-house properly projects 
Where three carved beams make a certain show, 

Dating — good thought of our architect's — 
'Five, six, nine, he lets you know. 

And all day long a bird sings there, 

And a stray sheep drinks at the pond at times; 
The place is silent and aware; 1 

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes, 
But that is its own affair. 

My perfect wife, my Leonor, 2 

Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too, 



156 BY THE FIRESIDE 

Whom else could I dare look backward for, 
With whom beside should I dare pursue 
The path gray heads abhor? 

For it leads to a crag's sheer edge with them; 

Youth, flowery all the way, there stops — 
Not they; age threatens and they contemn, 

Till they reach the gulf wherein youth drops, 
One inch from our life's safe hem! 

With me, youth led ... I will speak now, 

No longer watch you as you sit 
Reading by firelight, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
Mutely, my heart knows how — 

When, if I think but deep enough, 

You are wont to answer, prompt as rhyme; 

And you, too, find without rebuff 

Response your soul seeks many a time, 

Piercing its fine flesh-stuff. 

My own, confirm me! If I tread 

This path back, is it not in pride 
To think how little I dreamed it led 

To an age so blest that, by its side, 
Youth seems the waste instead? 



BY THE FIRESIDE 157 

My own, see where the years conduct! 

At first, 'twas something our two souls 
Should mix as mists do; each is sucked 

In each now; on, the new stream rolls, 
Whatever rocks obstruct. 

Think, when our one soul understands 

The great Word which makes all things new, 

When earth breaks up and heaven expands, 
How will the change strike me and you 

In the house not made with hands? 

Oh I must feel your brain prompt mine, 

Your heart anticipate my heart, 
You must be just before, in fine, 

See and make me see, for your part, 
New depths of the divine! 

But who could have expected this 

When we two drew together first 
Just for the obvious human bliss, 

To satisfy life's daily thirst 
With a thing men seldom miss? 

Come back with me to the first of all, 
Let us lean and love it over again, 



158 BY THE FIRESIDE 

Let us now forget and now recall, 

Break the rosary in a pearly rain, 
And gather what we let fall ! 

What did I say? 1 — that a small bird sings 
All day long, save when a brown pair 

Of hawks from the wood float with wide wings 
Strained to a bell: 'gainst noonday glare 

You count the streaks and rings. 

But at afternoon or almost eve 
Tis better; then the silence grows 

To that degree, you half believe 
It must get rid of what it knows, 

Its bosom does so heave. 

Hither we walked then, side by side, 

Arm in arm and cheek to cheek, 
And still I questioned or replied, 

While my heart, convulsed to really speak, 
Lay choking in its pride. 

Silent the crumbling bridge we cross, 
And pity and praise the chapel sweet, 

And care about the fresco's loss, 

And wish for our souls a like retreat, 

And wonder at the moss. 



BY THE FIRESIDE 159 

Stoop and kneel on the settle under, 

Look through the window's grated square: 

Nothing to see ! For fear of plunder, 
The cross is down and the altar bare, 

As if thieves don't fear thunder. 

We stoop and look in through the grate, 

See the little porch and rustic door, 
Read duly the dead builder's date; 

Then cross the bridge that we crossed before, 
Take the path again — but wait ! 

Oh moment one and infinite! 

The water slips o'er stock and stone; 
The West is tender, hardly bright : 

How gray at once is the evening grown — 
One star, its chrysolite ! 1 

We two stood there with never a third, 
But each by each, as each knew well: 

The sights we saw and the sounds we heard, 
The lights and the shades made up a spell 

Till the trouble grew and stirred. 

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! 
And the little less, and what worlds away! 



160 BY THE FIRESIDE 

How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, 
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, 
And life be a proof of this ! 

Had she willed it, still had stood the screen 
So slight, so sure, 'twixt my love and her: 

I could fix her face with a guard between, 
And find her soul as when friends confer, 

Friends — lovers that might have been. 

For my heart had a touch of the woodland time, 

Wanting to sleep now over its best. 
Shake the whole tree in the summer-prime, 

But bring to the last leaf no such test ! 
"Hold the last fast!" runs the rhyme. 

For a chance to make your little much, 

To gain a lover and lose a friend, 
Venture the tree and a myriad such, 

When nothing you mar but the year can mend 
But a last leaf — fear to touch! 

Yet should it unfasten itself and fall 

Eddying down till it find your face 
At some slight wind — best chance of all! 

Be your heart henceforth its dwelling-place 
You trembled to forestall! 



BY THE FIRESIDE 161 

Worth how well, those dark gray eyes, 
That hair so dark and dear, how worth 

That a man should strive and agonize, 
And taste a veriest hell on earth 

For the hope of such a prize! 

You might have turned and tried a man, 

Set him a space to weary and wear, 
And prove which suited more your plan, 

His best of hope or his worst despair, 
Yet end as he began. 

But you spared me this, like the heart you are, 
And filled my empty heart at a word. 

If two lives join, there is oft a scar, 

They are one and one, with a shadowy third; 

One near one is too far. 

A moment after, and hands unseen 

Were hanging the night around us fast; 

But we knew that a bar was broken between 
Life and life : we were mixed at last 

In spite of the mortal screen. 

The forests had done it; there they stood; 
We caught for a moment the powers at play: 



162 BY THE FIRESIDE 

They had mingled us so, for once and good, 

Their work was done — we might go or stay, 
They relapsed to their ancient mood. 

How the world is made for each of us! 

How all we perceive and know in it 
Tends to some moment's product thus, 

When a soul declares itself — to wit, 
By its fruit, the thing it does! l 

Be hate that fruit, or love that fruit, 
It forwards the general deed of man, 

And each of the Many helps to recruit 
The life of the race by a general plan ; 

Each living his own, to boot. 

I am named and known by that moment's feat; 

There took my station and degree; 
So grew my own small life complete, 

As Nature obtained her best of me — 
One born to love you, sweet! 

And to watch you sink by the fireside now 

Back again, as you mutely sit 
Musing by firelight, that great brow 

And the spirit-small hand propping it, 
Yonder, my heart knows how! 



BY THE FIRESIDE 163 

So, earth has gained by one man the more, 
And the gain of earth must be heaven 's gain 
too; 

And the whole is well worth thinking o'er 
When autumn comes: which I mean to do 

One day, as I said before. 



NOTES 

CAVALIER TUNES 

15, 1. These three songs were included in the Dramatic 
Lyrics published in 1842 as the third number of Bells and 
Pomegranates. The third was originally entitled My Wife 
Gertrude. They have been set to music by Dr. Villiers 
Stanford. 

" The speaker is a typical cavalier of the days of Charles 
I., the time is the height of the Civil War with the issue 
still in the balance, the place a banquet hall echoing the 
clash of glasses and shouts of cavaliers." 

2. Pym: John Pym, John Hampden, Sir Arthur Hazel- 
rig, William Fiennes, and Sir Harry Vane " the Younger " 
were English statesmen. Prince Rupert was a Bavarian 
soldier, a general in the army of his uncle, Charles I. 

3. Carles (Dial. Eng.): Churls, rustics — in contempt. 

4. Paries (Fr. parler, speak): Parleys. 

16, 1. Rouse (Sw. rusa, rush): "An awakening to or a 
signal for action." 

17, 1. Noll: Oliver Cromwell, England's patriot general 
and statesman, after Charles I's execution Lord Protector 
of England. 

18, 1. Flouts: (ME. fluyten, jeer, play the flute): Scoff, 
mock. 

2. Fay: An archaic form of faith. 

" HOW THEY BROUGHT THE GOOD NEWS FROM 
GHENT TO AIX" 

21, 1. Pique: The pommel of the saddle. 
2. Lokeren: This town and the others mentioned in the 
165 



166 NOTES 

poem will be found upon any good map, in a general line 
from Ghent to Aix-la-Chapelle. The whole distance is about 
ninety miles. 

3. Mecheln: The Flemish form of the more common 
French Malines. 

23, 1. Dalhem: Probably Dalheim, a town about midway 
between Tongres and Aix. 

2. Save Aix from her fate: The reader is to imagine that 
Aix has resolved upon self-destruction, rather than yield to 
the Spaniards. 

HOME THOUGHTS, FROM THE SEA 

28, 1. This poem is an expression of patriotic feeling 
awakened in the poet by passing the scenes of Nelson's 
great naval exploits. 

INCIDENT OF THE FRENCH CAMP 

28, 2. Ratisbon or Regensburg: A town on the Danube, 65 
miles north of Munich, not far from the river Isar. The 
" incident " here described was an actual occurrence. 

29, 1. My army-leader Lannes: One of Napoleon's most 
distinguished marshals. He commanded in the battles of 
Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, and others. For 
winning the battle of Montebello he was made Duke of 
Montebello. 

2. Vans: From the French van, a wing. The wings of the 
imperial eagle upon the banner flap in the wind. 

THE BOY AND THE ANGEL 

32,1. Tiring-room: "The room where the "holy vest- 
ments" are kept, with which the priests and pope are dight," 
i.e., decked or attired. Shakespeare used the noun tire for 
attire. 



NOTES 167 

ONE WORD MORE 

35, 1. Louvre: The great museum in Paris. 

2. In circle: This last picture is circular in form. 

3. Guido Reni (1575-1642): An Italian painter. 

4. Beatrice: Pronounce in four syllables. 
37, 1. Bice: Pronounce in two syllables. 
2. Read Exodus xvii. 

39, 1. Sinai-forehead: Read Exodus xxiv, xxxii, and 
xxxiv. 

2. Jethro's daughter: Read Exodus ii and iii. 

40, 1. Karshish, etc.: These and the names two lines below 
are characters in his poems. 

41, 1. Fiesole: A town on a hill above Florence. 
2. Samminiato: In Florence. 

42, 1. Mythos: Of the. mortal whom Diana loved. 

2. Zoroaster: Founder of the ancient Persian religion. 

3. Galileo (1564-1642): An Italian astronomer. 

4. Aaron, Nadab, Abihu: See Exodus vi and xxviii. 

HERVE RIEL 

44, 1. It is noticeable that of Browning's two grand bal- 
lads — Herve Riel and How They Brought the Good News 
from Ghent to Aix — neither has an English inspiration. Herve 
Riel records the heroism of a Breton sailor who guided the 
French squadron retreating from La Hogue, through the 
shallows of the river Ranee, to a safe harborage. Brown- 
ing follows history, except in one point which he overlooked 
— that Herve Riel claimed holiday for life, instead of for 
one day. 

The battle of La Hogue was fought May 19, 1692., in the 
war begun by Louis XIV of France to secure his succession 
to the Palatinate. Other powers formed a " Grand Alli- 
ance " against him, and at La Hogue, between the penin- 
sula of La Manche and the Isle of Wight, the French fleet 
was defeated by the English and Dutch fleet, commanded 



168 NOTES 

by Admiral Russell. This victory transferred naval suprem- 
acy from France to England and Holland. Some of the 
French ships which retreated to Cherbourg were taken; how 
others escaped Browning here tells us. 

This poem was first printed in the Cornhill Magazine, 
March, 1871. The hundred pounds which Browning re- 
ceived for it was given to a fund for the relief of Paris, then 
suffering from the Franco-German war. 

2. St. Malo, on the river Ranee, and La Hogue are on 
the north coast of Normandy. 

3. Damfreville: The commander of the largest French ship. 

45, 1. Twelve and eighty: A literal translation of the French 
quatre-vingt-douze. 

46, 1. Plymouth: One of the chief British naval stations. 

2. Tourville: The French admiral. 

3. Croisickese: An inhabitant of Le Croisic. Le Croisic, 
the home of Herve Riel, is a small fishing village on the south 
coast of Brittany. 

4. Malouins: People of St. Malo. 

47, 1. Greve: The sands around Mont St. Michel. Dis- 
embogues (Sp. disemboca): Empties. 

2. Solidor: A fortified place on the French mainland. 

49, 1. The bay: Of St. Michel. 

2. Rampired: An archaic form of " ramparted "; fortified. 

51, 1. Wrack (D. wrak, wrack): Ruin, destruction. 

2. Bore the bell: Won the victory. 

3. The heroes . . . Louvre: The heroes whose pictures 
are in the Louvre, the great art gallery of Paris. 

PHEIDIPPIDES 

52, 1. This poem was published in Dramatic Idyls in 1879. 
" The story stands out with something of the joyful pride 
of a Greek statue among its Gothic associates." 

In 490 B.C. the Persians, having razed Eretria, invaded 
Attica, and camped on the plain of Marathon. The Athenian 
army assembled and its generals sent a trained runner, 



NOTES 169 

Philippides, or Pheidippides, to ask Lacedaemonian aid. 
He traversed the one hundred and forty miles between 
Athens and Sparta in forty-eight hours, and found the 
Spartans, who were celebrating their great national festival 
of the Carneia, backward from superstition or jealousy in 
joining their forces with the Athenians. 

" And as to Pan, they say that Philippides (who was sent 
as a messenger to Lacedaemon when the Persians landed) 
reported that the Lacedaemonians were deferring their 
march ; for it was their custom not to go out on a campaign 
till the moon was at its full. But he said that he had met 
with Pan near the Parthenian forest, and he had said that 
he was friendly to the Athenians, and would come out and 
help them at Marathon. Pan has been honored therefore 
for this message." — Pausanias in Description of Greece. 

For full account of the battle of Marathon, consult Creasy's 
Fifteen Decisive Battles. There seems no historic founda- 
tion for the closing incident related by Browning. 

This motto is the Greek: " Rejoice, we conquer." " Re- 
joice " was the usual Greek salutation, born of Marathon 
day. 

2. Daemons (Gr. daimori): Spirits. 

3. Zeus: The supreme Greek god. Her of the aegis and 
spear: Pallas-Athene, the guardian goddess of Athens, the 
only deity whose authority was equal to that of Zeus. This 
eegis was a wonderful shield given to her by her father Zeus. 

4. Ye of the bow and the buskin: Artemis and Phoebus- 
Apollo, whose symbols these were. 

5. Pan: The Greek god of the woods, always represented 
as having the legs of a goat. 

6. Archons (Gr. archo, rule): The chief magistrates of 
Athens after the cessation of kingly rule. Tettix (Gr.): 
A grasshopper. " The Athenians sometimes wore golden 
grasshoppers in their hair as badges of honor," because they 
thought those insects sprang from the ground, and they 
claimed for their ancestors similar origin. 



170 NOTES 

53, 1. Water and earth: In token of submission. 
2. Razed: Destroyed utterly. 

54, 1. Olumpos: A lofty mountain in Thessaly, whose 
cloudy summit was believed to be the home of the gods. 

55, 1. Filleted: Animals about to be sacrificed to the gods 
were adorned with garlands. Every sacrifice was accom- 
panied by a libation, wine poured on the ground in honor 
of the deity. Fulsome (ME. fulsum, ful, iu\\+sum, some). 
Here used with its early meaning of full, rich, not its later 
acquired meaning of over-rich, hence disgusting. 

2. Oak and olive and bay: Zeus is frequently depicted 
with his head garlanded with oak leaves. The olive tree, 
symbol of peace and plenty, was sacred to Athene, as was 
the bay or laurel to Apollo. 

56, 1. Parnes: These mountains were north of Athens, 
outside of Pheidippides' route. 

2. Fosse (Lat. fossa): A ditch. 

57, 1. Ivy: The ivy was consecrated to Pan. 

2. Wanton: Hanging loose. Cf. Paradise Lost, IV, 366. 

58, 1. Greaved-thigh: Cf. note 52, 5. Greaves were armor 
worn to protect the legs from knee to ankle. 

2. Fennel: (Gr. marathon): A common herb. The field of 
Marathon was so named because overgrown with this plant. 
What was the significance of Pan's gift? 

59, 1. Miltiades: The great Athenian general selected for 
supreme command at Marathon. 

60, 1. Akropolis (Gr. akros, height + polis, city): The cit- 
adel of Athens. 

61, 1. How did the fame of Miltiades and Themistocles 
decline? 

MY LAST DUCHESS 

62, 1. Fra Pandolf: An imaginary artist, as also Claus of 
Innsbruck in the last verse. 

63, 1. I gave commands: It is not necessary to suppose 
that the " commands " were for her death. Prolonged 
cruelty would have served his purpose. Browning, when 



NOTES 171 

asked what the " commands " were, called the query " a 
silly question," saying he had no thought of anything beyond 
the mere order as a revelation of character. 

64, 1. Notice Neptune: As they are about to descend the 
stairs, the soulless old virtuoso calls the envoy's attention 
to a work of art in the courtyard below, of which he is 
especially proud. 

UP AT A VILLA — DOWN IN THE CITY 

64, 2. The whole poem is a picture of Italian life before the 
kingdom of Italy was formed — the Italy of nearly a cen- 
tury ago. It is famous for its pictures of Italian scenery 
as well as for its interpretation of character. The Italian 
nobleman of the poverty-stricken villa is as real a picture 
as Andrea del Sarto, or the Duke of My Last Duchess. 
Browning knew Italy and the Italians. It is worth noting 
how the meter is suited to the theme; its rapid movement, 
the prosaic effect secured in many passages, the whole so 
unlike the melody of A bt Vogler or Saul. 

67, 1. " The stunning cicala " : Like the locust of our north- 
ern lands. 

68, 1. "The diligence": The stage coach of continental 
Europe; still used in parts of Italy and Switzerland. 

2. " Pulcinello " : Punch and Judy shows, announced by 
a trumpeter. 

3. "Who is Dante," etc.: Who surpasses the greatest 
poets, theologians, orators, and is as great a preacher as 
St. Paul. 

SAUL 

70, 1. The first nine sections of Saul were printed in the 
seventh number of Bells and Pomegranates in 1845. The 
concluding stanzas were written in the winter of 1853-54, 
and the poem as enlarged was published in Men and Women, 
1855. 



172 NOTES 

The poem is based on / Samuel xvi, 14-23, where Saul is 
roused to consciousness and sanity by the music of David. 
This music is represented as " having three series of rising 
motives: first, tunes used to the brutes, sheep, quail, crickets, 
jerboa; second, the help-tunes of great epochs in human 
life, — reapers, burial, marriage, soldiers, priests; third, the 
songs of human aspirations, wild joys of living, fame crown- 
ing ambition and noble deeds, praise of unborn genera- 
tions, the next world's reward and repose," but it is not 
until the culmination, the assurance of the God-love, which 
is the Christ, that the king is roused from his lethargy. 
" Saul is a magnificent interpretation of the old theme, a 
favorite with the mystics, that evil spirits are driven out by 
music. But in this interpretation it is not the mere tones, 
the thrumming on the harp, it is the religious movement of 
the intelligence, it is the truth of Divine love throbbing in 
every chord, which constitutes the-spell." — Corson. 

2. Abner: A Jewish general, Saul's cousin and friend. 

3. Spirit: Melancholy and insanity were anciently attrib- 
uted to evil spirits, which took possession of the afflicted 
persons. 

72, 1. Drear (A.S. dreorig, sad): Dreary, cheerless. Stark 
(A.S. Stearc, stiff): Rigid. 

74, 1. Jerboa: An Old-World rodent animal, remarkable 
for swift flying leaps. 

75, 1. Male-sapphire: The ancient sapphire was the same 
as our lapis-lazuli. 

76, 1. Locust-flesh: Sometimes used in Oriental countries 
for food. 

2. How good is man's life, the mere living: This strikes 
the keynote of the whole stanza. 

77, 1. Sympathy and rivalry may exist at the same time 
between brothers. 

2. Throe (Scot, thraw): Pain, agony. 

78, 1. In the edition of 1845 the last four lines of this 
section read thus: 



NOTES 173 

" On one head the joy and the pride, even rage like the throe 
That opes the rock, helps its glad labor, and lets the 

gold go — 
And ambition that sees a man lead it — oh, all of these — 

all 
Combine to unite in one creature — Saul." 

2. Cherubim (Heb. k'mbh): Angelic beings excelling in 
knowledge, next in rank to seraphim. 

79, 1. David's music had served Saul an ill turn had it 
only roused him from lethargy to despair. 

84, 1. First King: Cf. / Samuel 10. 

86, 1. Evanish: A poetical form of vanish. 

2. Hebron: A town sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem. 

3. Kidron: Kedron, a winter brook in a ravine east of 
Jerusalem. 

4. And behold . . . sunshine: David pauses in his narra- 
tion, which he resumes in the next section. 

89, 1. Harp and song have served their turn, and David 
puts them aside for inspired speech. " The truth " bursts 
on him. Would he save Saul? Why, so would God. He 
cannot? But God can. And so by his human love and 
sympathy he realizes the divine, and prophesies the Christ. 
It is a tremendous inference, but nothing less is possible 
unless the creature's love is to excel the Creator's. 

90, 1. Purblind (pure + blind): First, totally blind ; then, 
dim of vision. 

93, 1. Sabaoth (Gr. from Heb. tsebaoth): Armies, hosts; 
used chiefly in the phrase Lord God of Sabaoth. 

94, 1. Impuissance : Want of power, inability. 
2. Cf. Rabbi Ben Ezra: 

" What I aspired to be 
And was not, comforts me." 

97, 1. The whole earth . . . is so: " Mr. Browning's most 
characteristic feeling for nature appears in his rendering of 



174 NOTES 

those aspects of sky, or earth, or sea, of sunset, or noonday, or 
dawn, which seem to acquire some sudden passionate sig- 
nificance; which seem to be charged with some spiritual 
secret eager for disclosure ; in his rendering of those moments 
which betray the passion at the heart of things, which thrill 
and tingle with prophetic fire . . . when to David the 
stars shoot out the pain of pent knowledge and in the gray 
of the hills at morning there dwells a gathered intensity, — 
then nature rises from her sweet ways of use and wont, 
and shows herself the Priestess, the Pythoness, the Divinity 
which she is. Or rather, through nature, the spirit of God 
addresses itself to the spirit of man." — Dowden. 

A GRAMMARIAN'S FUNERAL 

97, 2. The Grammarian's Funeral was published in 1855 in 
the volume Men and Women. 

Grammarian is here used, not in its present narrow sense, 
but with the broader meaning of a scholar, a student whose 
life was devoted to letters. No particular person is indicated, 
but the spirit is that which animated many a scholar — a 
Scaliger, a Casaubon, a Pierre de Maricourt — of the early 
Renaissance period, the Revival of Learning which, begin- 
ing in Italy, spread over all Europe, and marked the transi- 
tion from mediaeval to modern history. The speaker is 
one of the dead Grammarian's disciples who are bearing him 
to the mountain top — a fit burial-place for him of lofty 
aspirations. The parentheses give the leader's directions to 
the corpse-bearers. Note the effect and appropriateness of 
the meter, the long iambic followed by the short adonic. 

3. Crofts (A.S. croft): Fields or little farms. Thorpes (A.S. 
thorp): Villages or hamlets. Common and vulgar refer to 
the ignorant and uneducated people of these crofts and 
thorpes. 

4. Tether (A.S. teodor, halter): Narrow bounds. 

5. Rock-row: Mountain ridge. 



NOTES 175 

98, 1. Overcome: Pass over; overshadow. Cf. Macbeth 
III. 4, 3. 

99, 1. Gowned him: Took up the student life. 

100, 1. Queasy (Norw. kveis, sickness after a debauch): 
Qualmish, nauseated. 

2. Fabric, dab brick: Note effect of this and similar rhymes. 

101, 1. Calculus . . . him: Diseases attacked him. Cal- 
culus (Lat.): The stone. Tussis (Lat.): A cough. 

2. Hydroptic (Gr. hydropikos): Dropsical, thirsty. " Every 
lust is a kind of hydropic distemper, and the more we drink 
the more we shall thirst." — Tillotson. 

3. God's task ... the earthen? Cf. Abt Voglet. "On 
earth the broken arcs; in heaven, the perfect round." 

102, 1. The keynote of this poem is Browning's favorite 
tenet, which the Talmud thus words: "It is not incumbent 
on thee to complete the work; but thou must not therefore 
desist from it." 

2. To know the whole he would perfect himself in the 
minutest parts. Hoti, the Greek particle, tin, that, etc. 
Oun, the Greek particle, olv, then, etc. Concerning " the 
doctrine of the enclitic De," Browning cited scholarly author- 
ity and said " that De meaning ' towards ' and as a demon- 
strative appendage is not to be confounded with the accen- 
tuated De meaning ' but,' was the ' doctrine ' which the 
Grammarian bequeathed to those capable of receiving 
it." 

3. Purlieus (Lat. per, through + Fr. alive, go). Outlying 
districts. 

103, 1. This man of lofty aspirations must have a burial- 
place symbolic of his past" and future. 

SONG FROM " PIPPA PASSES" 

103, 2. Pippa's hymn strikes the keynote of the whole 
poem, asserting that " the service of all God's children is 
equally valuable in his sight." 



176 NOTES 



AN EPISTLE 

104, 1. An Epistle was begun at Rome in the winter of 
1853-54, and finished later at Florence. It was published 
in Men and Women, 1855. 

The poem is based on the account given in John ii, 1-46 of 
Christ's healing of Lazarus. Hardly less remarkable than 
the depictment of the effect of Lazarus' experience on his 
subsequent life is the psychological study of the learned 
leech, with his incredulous, science-trained intellect and his 
heart hungering for God's truth. Despite his protestations, 
we soon feel that it is to tell this strange tale of Lazarus — 
not to discourse of spiders and borage — that he writes to 
his master, and the truth breaks out at the last in that 
yearning eloquent cry for the God of Love. 

2. Snake-stone: Placed upon a snake-bite, it was supposed 
to absorb or charm away the poison. 

105, 1. Were brought: That is, in his last letter. 

2. This gives us the date of the Epistle. Titus Flavius 
Vespasianus was sent by Nero in 66 to conduct the war 
against the Jews; when proclaimed emperor in 70 he left 
his son to carry on the war. 

3. Who studious ... for a spy: See the true spirit of the 
man of science, — his zeal in pursuit of knowledge, his 
contempt of hindering dangers. 

4. Bethany: A village two miles from Jerusalem. The 
leech indicates the distance vividly and characteristically. 

5. Choler (Gr. chole, bile): Here used in its original sense 
of bile. 

6. Spider: Probably one of the saltigrade species, which 
springs on its prey like a cat or tiger. Spiders were used 
internally and externally for medicine down to a compara- 
tively recent period. Sir Walter Raleigh, for instance, 
approved the healing virtues of a certain spider preparation. 

106, 1. Porphyry: A hard stone used by the ancients as 
a mortar. 



NOTES 177 

2. Hadst: Wouldst have. Zoar: One of the " cities of 
the plain," near the Dead Sea. Cf. Genesis xix, 22. 

3. Devotion is my price, et seq.i Karshish protests that it 
is because he fears to trust his Syrian messenger with im- 
portant matters that he tells the idle tale of Lazarus — thus 
deprecating Abib's scorn. 

107, 1. Exhibition: Here has its medical sense — to admin- 
ister a remedy. 

108, 1. Fume: A fancy. 

110, 1. Our lord: Some sage under whom Abib and Kar- 
shish had studied. 

111, 1. Greek fire: This is an anachronism, as Greek fire 
was first used in warfare by the Byzantine Greeks against 
the Saracens at the siege of Constantinople in 673 a.d. 
Liquid fire, however, was used by the ancients. Gibbon 
says (Ch. 57): " It would seem that the principal ingredient 
was the naphtha or liquid bitumen, a light, tenacious inflam- 
mable oil, which springs from the earth and catches fire as 
soon as it comes in contact with the air." 

115, 1. Blue-flowering borage: A plant valued for its 
stimulating medical properties. " The ancients deemed this 
plant one of the four ' cordial flowers ' for cheering the spirits, 
the others being the rose, violet, and alkanet." Aleppo: A 
city of Syria. 

116, 1. Perhaps the journey's end . . . and farewell! Kar- 
shish apologizes for dwelling at length on the case of this 
recovered epileptic Jew, and promises to write at leisure from 
Jerusalem on matters of more moment. 

2. The very God! ... it is strange: Art and science are 
thrust aside: the man's very soul cries out for God, — the 
God of this despised " madman." 

MEETING AT NIGHT 

118, 3. Meeting at Night and Parting at Morning were 
published in 1845 in the seventh number of Bells and 
Pomegranates. The speaker is a man who at night goes gladly 



178 NOTES 

home to peace and love, and at morning as gladly back to 
the world and work. 

PROSPICE 

117, 1. Prospice (look forward), written the fall after Mrs. 
Browning's death, was published in Dramatis Personal in 
1864. It expresses the poet's scorn of the idle and cowardly- 
fear of death, and his faith in personal immortality. 
" Death," said Browning, when its shadow was over him, 
" is life, just as our daily, our momentarily dying body is 
none the less alive and ever recruiting new forces of exist- 
ence. Without death, which is our crape-like churchyardy 
word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation 
of that which we call life. . . . For myself, I deny death as 
an end of anything. Never say of me that I am dead." 

2. Arch fear: Death. 

118, 1. Guerdon (LL. voider donum. A half translation of 
the OHG. widarlon, widar, back again + Ion, reward.): Rec- 
ompense. 

2. Brunt (Tee. brenna, burn): " The ' brunt ' of the battle 
is the ' heat ' of the battle where it burns most fiercely." — 
Trench. 

3. A beautiful allusion to his wife. 

EPILOGUE TO " ASOLANDO" 

118, 4. The Epilogue to Asolando, 1889, is " the last word 
spoken by Browning to the world. It is an epilogue not only 
to Asolando but to the whole of his life . . . reminds us of 
Browning's bracing, tonic effect upon all of us, and the hope- 
fulness and support he has afforded many in hours of gloom 
or trouble. Standing apart from criticism, the poem is 
brave, energetic, stimulant." — F. M. Wilson. 

Compare with this Tennyson's swan song, Crossing the 
Bar. Reread also Browning's Prospice, which it suggests. 

119, 1. Mawkish (Ice. madhkr, maggot): Sickening, in- 
sipid. 



NOTES 179 

2. Worsted: Defeated; have the worst of it. 

3. Fare (A.S. faran, travel) : Go on ; often used impersonally. 

MY STAR 

120, 1. A certain star: The metaphor of this suggestive 
little poem is thus interpreted by Mrs. Orr, in her " Hand- 
book to Browning's Works ": " ' My Star ' may be taken as 
a tribute to the personal element in love ; the bright peculiar 
light in which the sympathetic soul reveals itself to the 
object of its sympathy." 

RABBI BEN EZRA 

121, 1. The best is yet to be: The poet expresses the thought 
in Saul thus: 

" By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still shalt 
enjoy 
More indeed, than at first when inconscious, the life of 
a boy." 

122, 1. Irks care, etc.: Care does not annoy, nor doubt 
fret, the well-fed bircT or beast. 

2. Nearer we hold of God: We possess the right or title to 
a nearer relationship with God. 

123, 1. In Saul the poet says: " 'tis not what man Does 
which exalts him, but what man Would do." 

2. Dole: Share, that which is dealt. 

124, 1. Its term: Its terminus, proper end or limit. 

127, 1. Right? Was I whom the world arraigned, or 
were they whom my soul disdained, right? 

128, 1. That metaphor: Compare the same metaphor, 
Isaiah lxiv, 8 and xxix, 16; Jeremiah xviii, 2-6; Romans 
ix, 21. 

ABT VOGLER 

131, 1. The Abt or Abbe George Joseph Vogler (born at 
Wiirzburg, Bavaria, in 1749, died at Darmstadt, 1824) was 



180 NOTES 

a composer, professor, kapellmeister, and writer on music. 
Among his pupils were Weber and Meyerbeer. The " mu- 
sical instrument of his invention " was called an orchestrion. 
" It was," says Sir G. Grove, " a very compact organ, in 
which four keyboards of five octaves each, and a pedal board 
of thirty-six keys, with swell complete, were packed into a 
cube of nine feet." 

132, 1. As when Solomon willed: The reference is to legends 
of the Koran, which attribute to Solomon the possession of 
magical powers. 

134, 1. Protoplast: " The original; the thing first formed as 
a copy to be imitated." 

135, 1. In sight? . . . made perfect too: " Verses four and 
five are a bold attempt to describe the indescribable, to 
shadow forth that strange state of clairvoyance when the 
soul shakes itself free from all external impressions, which 
Vogel tells us was the case with Schubert, and which is true 
of all great composers — ' whether in the body or out of the 
body, I cannot say.'" — Mrs. Turnbull: Browning Soc. 
Papers, Pt. IV. 

2. But here is the finger of God: Tha other arts are " tri- 
umphant," but are only " art in obedience to laws "; the 
effects of music are allied to the miraculous. 

" There is no sound in nature," says Schopenhauer, " fit 
to serve the musician as a model, or to supply him with 
more than an occasional suggestion for his sublime purpose. 
He approaches the original sources of existence more closely 
than all other artists, nay, even than Nature herself." 

ANDREA DEL SARTO 

141, 1. Fiesole (fes'o-le) : The ancient Fcesuloe, a town 
three miles N.E. of Florence, on a steep hill, commanding a 
magnificent view of the Arno Valley. 

2. As married people use: i.e., ought, or are wont to be. 

142, 1. In France: Andrea del Sarto was summoned to the 
court of Francis I of France, where his painting was highly 



NOTES 181 

honored and handsomely remunerated. Urged by the let- 
ters from his wife, he obtained permission of the king to 
revisit Florence, on condition of a speedy return to his 
work; but he broke his pledges, and with a sum of money 
with which his royal patron had intrusted him, for the 
purchase of works of art, built the " melancholy little house " 
(page 148, last line), to please the soulless Lucrezia. 

143, 1. Low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand: "Andrea 
del Sarto 's was, after all, but the ' low-pulsed forthright crafts- 
man's hand,' and therefore his perfect art does not touch 
our hearts like that of Fra Bartolommeo, who occupies about 
the same position with regard to the great masters of the 
century as Andrea del Sarto. Fra Bartolommeo spoke 
from his heart. He was moved by the spirit, so to speak, 
to express his pure and holy thoughts in beautiful language, 
and the ideal that presented itself to his mind, and from 
which he, equally with Raphael, worked, approached almost 
as closely as Raphael's to that abstract beauty after which 
they both longed. Andrea del Sarto had no such longing; 
he was content with the loveliness of earth. This he could 
understand and imitate in its fullest perfection, and there- 
fore he troubled himself but little about the ' wondrous 
paterne ' laid up in heaven. Many of his Madonnas have 
greater beauty, strictly speaking, than those of Bartolommeo, 
or even of Raphael; but we miss in them that mysterious 
spiritual loveliness that gives the latter their chief charm." 
— Heaton's History of Painting. 

144, 1. Morello: The highest spur of the Apennines to the 
north of Florence. 

2. What does the mountain care? It is beyond their crit- 
icism. 

3. A man's reach should exceed his grasp: " The true glory 
of art is, that in its creation there arise desires and aspira- 
tions never to be satisfied on earth, but generating new de- 
sires and new aspirations, by which the spirit of man mounts 
to God himself. The artist (Mr. Browning loves to insist on 



182 NOTES 

this point) who can realize in marble, or in color, or in music, 
his ideal, has thereby missed the highest gain of art. In 
Pip pa Passes the regeneration of the young sculptor's 
work turns on his finding that in the very perfection which 
he had attained lies ultimate failure. And one entire poem, 
Andrea del Sarto, has been devoted to the exposition of 
this thought. Andrea is ' the faultless painter' ; no line of 
his drawing ever goes astray; his hand expresses adequately 
and accurately all that his mind conceives; but for this 
very reason, precisely because he is ' the faultless painter,' 
his work lacks the highest qualities of art." — Professor 
Doted en. 

4. The Urbinate . . . out of me! Raphael Santi, born in 
Urbino, 1483. Though Andrea knows that Raphael is 
inferior to himself in technique, yet he acknowledges him 
to be his superior, because he reaches " above and through 
his art " toward heaven and things divine. 

5. George Vasari: Friend and pupil of Michael Angelo 
and Andrea del Sarto, and author of Lives of the Painters, 
Sculptors, and Architects. 

145, 1. By the future: i.e., in comparison with the future. 
2. Agnolo: Michael Angelo (or Michel Agnolo) Buona- 

rotti. 

146, 1. For fear, etc. : See note 1, page 142. 

147, 1. The triumph was, etc.: The real triumph was, to 
have ended in your heart ; that reached, the lesser triumph in 
France is no loss. 

2. Rafael did this, etc. : The supposed remark of some critic. 
151, 1. Leonard: Leonardo da Vinci. 

BY THE FIRESIDE 

151, 2. Is: The present with future meaning: " Where 
will be thy pleasant hue? " 

154, 1. Hemp-stalks steep: Hemp that is soaking in prep- 
aration for dressing. 

2. Fret: The lichens ornament as with raised work. 



NOTES 183 

155, 1. Aware: Self-conscious. 

2. My Leonor: The " perfect wife," with the " great brow " 
and the " spirit-small hand," can be no other than Eliza- 
beth Barrett Browning. The poem, though in its circum- 
stances purely dramatic and imaginary, is autobiographic 
in soul. Other beautiful allusions to Mrs. Browning may 
be found in One Word More, Prospice, and My Star. 

158, 1. What did I say? The description is here resumed, 
which was broken off at line 20, page 155. 

159, 1. Chrysolite: Greek XP V<X ^ and XtSos, gold-stone. 
Technically, a mineral substance of a pale green color. 

162, 1. "With Mr. Browning," says Professor Dowden, 
"those moments are most glorious in which the obscure ten- 
dency of many years has been revealed by the lightning of sud- 
den passion, or in which a resolution that changes the current 
life has been taken in reliance upon that insight which vivid 
emotion bestows ; and those periods of our history are charged 
most fully with moral purpose, which take their direction 
from moments such as these." Here it is the remembrance 
of one of those supreme moments which determined the 
issue of his life, that leads the speaker of the poem to ex- 
claim: " How the world is made for each of us! " etc. 



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Addison, Steele, and Budgell. The Sir Roger de Coverley 
Papers in "The Spectator." 1909-1915. Price, 30 
cents. 

Browning. Cavalier Tunes, The Lost Leader, How They 
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Evelyn 
Hope, Home Thoughts from Abroad, Home Thoughts 
from the Sea, Incident of the French Camp, The Boy 
and the Angel, One Word More, Herve Riel, Pheidip- 
pides, My Last Duchess, Up at a Villa — Down in the 
City. 1909-1915. Price, 25 cents. 

Bunyan. Pilgrim's Progress. Part I. 1909-1915. Price,** 

Coleridge. The Ancient Mariner. 1909-1915. Price, 25 

cents. 
Coleridge — The Ancient Mariner, and Lowell— The Vision 

of Sir Launfal, Combined. 1909-1915. Price, 40 cents. 

Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, Part I. 1913-1915. Price,** 



Dickens. A Tale of Two. Cities. 1909-1915. Price, 50 
cents. 

Eliot (George). Silas Marner. 1909-1915. Price, 40 cents. 

Emerson. Essays. (Selected.) 1909-1912. Price, 40 cents. 

Goldsmith. The Deserted Village. 1909-1915. Price, 25 
cents. 

Gray — Elegy in a Country Churchyard, and Goldsmith — 
The Deserted Village, Combined. 1913-1915. Price, 
30 cents. 

Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables. 1909-1915. 
Price, 40 cents. 

Lamb. Essays of Elia. 1909-1912. Price, 50 cents. 

Lincoln, Selections from. Including the two Inaugurals, 
the Speeches in Independence Hall and at Gettysburg, 
the Last Public Address, and Letter to Horace Greeley, 
along with a brief memoir or estimate. 1913-1915. 
Price, 25 cents. 

Lowell. The Vision of Sir Launfal. 1909-1915. Price, 
25 cents. 

Macaulay. Essays on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. 
1913-1915. Price, 40 cents. 

Macaulay— Lays of Ancient Rome, and Arnold — Sohrab 
and Rustum, Combined. 1909-1915. Price, 30 cents. 

Milton. Lycidas, Comus, L'Allegro, and II Penseroso. 

1909-1915. Price, 25 cents. 

Poe — The Raven, Longfellow — The Courtship of Miles 
Standish, and Whittier — Snow-Bound, Combined. 
1913-1915. Price, 25 cents. 

Stevenson. Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. 
1913-1915. Price,** 

Stevenson. Treasure Island. 1913-1915. Price, 40 cents. 

Thoreau. Walden. 1913-1915. Price** 



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